The Dark Knight Rises Almost Featured Another Classic Villain Instead Of Bane
This may be a controversial take, but Christopher Nolan's 2012 film "The Dark Knight Rises" is the best of the three Batman films Nolan directed, and is handily one of the best superhero films ever made. Produced in the wake of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests, "The Dark Knight Rises" addressed the issue of Batman's wealth, pointing out explicitly that being a Batman isn't the best use of one's money. Bruce Wayne is a billionaire, and yet Gotham City still languishes. Bane (Tom Hardy) may be a terrorist who takes the entire city hostage, but he also noted that superhero billionaires are at the heart of economic injustice. Superheroes are not the solution.
"The Dark Knight Rises" also finally allows Batman to retire. One can only be infected by angst-based impulses toward vigilantism for so long before his knees begin to give out. "Rises" questioned the efficiency and health of a Batman, and didn't always come to rosy conclusions. It's a great film that tears down notions in popular culture that we have long taken for granted.
Bane first debuted in Batman comics in January of 1993, and he immediately became notorious for capably breaking Batman's spine. In the comics, Bane gets superpowers from a mysterious steroid called Venom. In Nolan's trilogy conclusion he was merely a strong human being, although he required a complex breathing apparatus to survive. The film also featured Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) and a cameo from the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy).
Co-writer Jonathan Nolan recently appeared on the "Happy Sad Confused" podcast, and he revealed that he and his brother briefly considered including the Riddler in their film. There were even rumors that Leonardo DiCaprio, who worked with Christopher Nolan on "Inception" was being encouraged for the role.
Let's see if you bleed green
The Riddler first appeared in Batman comics in 1948 and has been a mainstay ever since, appearing in just about every Batman reboot and iteration thereafter. In the 2022 film "The Batman," the Riddler was re-envisioned as a Zodiac-like serial killer played by Paul Dano. Typically, the Riddler is a cackling maniac very similar to the Joker as one might have seen in the seminal 1966 "Batman" TV series; Frank Gorshin remains the standard by which all future Riddlers will be measured.
It was, it seems, the Riddler's relative similarity to the Joker that kept the Nolan brothers away from employing him. The Joker had famously been the antagonist of Nolan's 2008 film "The Dark Knight," and actor Heath Ledger had won a posthumous Academy Award for playing the role. The Nolans' version of the Joker reimagined the Clown Prince of Crime as a youthful anarchist punker along the lines of Alex DeLarge from "A Clockwork Orange." It seems that Jonathan Nolan began to invent a version of the Riddler for "The Dark Knight Rises," but found he was just inventing another Joker. The screenwriter said:
"I sort of started to play with ideas about the Riddler and what could be done with that character. But it did feel like it was close enough to the space of what we'd done with Heath that you really needed to ... shift there."
There was also once a plan to include Ledger in "The Dark Knight Rises" participating in a subplot about a character named Gambol (Michael Jai White) who would have survived an attack by the Joker and become a supervillain himself. When Ledger died, that subplot was abandoned.
Whose idea was the Riddler?
According to a 2020 retrospective in Empire, it wasn't the Nolans' idea to include the Riddler in the first place. It seems that Warner Bros. wanted a more widely recognized villain for "The Dark Knight Rises," and it was they who wanted Nolan to ask DiCaprio to play the part. The script was never written and DiCaprio was never asked. It seems like a Nolan-penned version of the Riddler was merely a pipe dream cooked up by the studio moneymen. One can't blame them for suggesting the Riddler, however, given the success the studio had with "Batman Forever" in 1995. In that film, Jim Carrey played the Riddler, and the flick grossed over $336 million on a $100 million budget.
Nolan, despite having made three successful Batman pictures, isn't much of a comic book reader and says that he selected Bane merely for his physical presence. On the page, Bane is bulk like a bodybuilder, someone who can tower over Batman and physically intimidate him. This was a contrast to Nolan's version of the Joker, who was wiry, small, chaotic, and incapable of fistfighting anyone, much less Batman.
Judging by Jonathan Nolan's comments, their version of the Riddler would likely have been the same: a little guy who can't fight Batman. Bane was a mandate based on visual variety. Also, Nolan felt issues of class were pertinent, and once admitted that he wanted to retell Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" through a superhero lens. The Dickensian flare dies indeed stand out of the finished product.