Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight (2008) find Gotham at a time of peace. This is due to Batman taking the fall for Harvey Dent's murder. However, a new evil force named Bane has arrived in Gotham and aims to take over the city and expose the truth behind who Harvey Dent really was. Now that Wayne Manor has been completely rebuilt, Bruce Wayne has become almost reclusive, rarely leaving the estate. And with Bane taking over the city by force, it forces Batman to come out of retirement. But his allies are few and far between. An elusive jewel thief by the name of Selina Kyle could be the key to stopping Bane, but whose side is she on?
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Cillian Murphy played Scarecrow and Tom Hardy played Bane in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, and both ended up leading rival factions in Peaky Blinders. Murphy even popped up briefly in The Dark Knight Rises alongside Hardy, so the overlap runs deeper than just the casting choice.
Kravitz tried out for a small, unnamed role in 2012's The Dark Knight Rises and was reportedly told the studio wasn't going 'urban' for that part. A story she's told a couple of times since, long before Selina Kyle ever ended up being hers.
Tom Hardy didn't just make Bane's voice up on the spot. He based it on Bartley Gorman, a real bare-knuckle boxer nicknamed the 'King of the Gypsies.' Hardy pitched Nolan two options, play it safe like Darth Vader or go weird, and they went weird.
To stop set photos leaking the ending, Nolan had Christian Bale physically present on the day they filmed Bruce Wayne's funeral, dressed and on the call sheet like he was in the scene, even though the funeral is meant to be for Bruce. The headstone even read 'Miranda Tate' just in case a long lens caught it.
The mid-air plane sequence that opens the film wasn't a green screen job. Nolan actually dropped a full-size plane out of the sky over Scotland and let it hit the ground for real, a shoot that took months of planning but only two days to actually film.
Nolan is basically IMAX's biggest fan, and he proved it by gathering a room of fellow filmmakers and screening them the plane hijack prologue just to show what the format could do, hoping it'd give them the confidence to push back when studios tried to talk them out of shooting on film.
Matthew Modine's character Foley gets run down by Talia's truck near the end, but you only see the aftermath. Modine later said his stunt double's death scene was filmed so violently that Nolan worried it would push the movie into NC-17 territory, so it got cut down to keep the PG-13.
Costume designer Lindy Hemming let slip that there was once a scene showing a young Bane in a rough, homemade version of his mask, getting beaten and taunted, basically his own version of the League of Shadows training Bruce goes through in Batman Begins. It never made the final cut, so most of that backstory stayed a mystery.
Even with the ending this movie has, the studio approached Christian Bale about doing a fourth Batman movie. He said no, partly because the trilogy was always meant to be three films and partly, as he joked, because Nolan had already walked away and Bale figured his services weren't exactly required without him.
Hathaway went into her meeting with Nolan convinced she was reading for Harley Quinn, not Catwoman, and even dressed the part. It wasn't until partway through the audition that Nolan told her she was actually there for Selina Kyle. Whatever she did clearly worked.
