They need to be bad, but never too “creepy,” and rarely ever scary. But within the larger framework of the superhero movie genre, this desire to not rock the boat has been the dominant mission statement of superhero movie villains ever since Joss Whedon’s The Avengers grossed more than The Dark Knight Rises. In the case of a Waititi comedy, such an instinct makes sense. For that reason, even though Bale infused his scenes with a genuinely threatening energy, the Gorr character had to still be handled with a light touch. “There’s an awful lot that I wish was in this film… there’s so much gold that’s on the cutting room floor, hilarious stuff, and creepy as hell stuff, but that was perhaps pushing it to a realm where maybe it wouldn’t have been able to be family friendly, which we always wanted to do.”Īdmittedly, as Bale also points out, it was always his and co-writer/director Taika Waititi’s intention to make Thor 4 a family friendly movie, as well as an outright comedy. While discussing his turn as Gorr the God Butcher in 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder, Bale said the following: In a recent interview with Collider, Hardy’s The Dark Knight Rises co-star, Christian Bale, made an intriguing admission about his experience of walking across the proverbial street and playing a supervillain for Marvel Studios a decade later. It’s a casting choice that likely wouldn’t be made today, partially because comic book fans would demand a more accurate page-to-screen Bane, and partially for the justifiable skepticism toward the British Hardy playing a character who is Latino in the comics. Nolan wanted Bane and, more surprising still, he wanted his newfound pal from 2010’s Inception, the five-foot and nine-inch Englishman Tom Hardy, to play that looming adversary who’d tower over Christian Bale’s Batman. But as for what became The Dark Knight Rises? Nolan chased other muses, imagining a supervillain of immense physical menace and restrained cunning, the likes of which the Caped Crusader had never before faced in a movie. Warners and fans would more or less get that film when Matt Reeves rebooted the Batman mythos 14 years after The Dark Knight. More often, however, fans seemed to support the industry trades who openly speculated on who should play the Riddler and Penguin in the next Batman movie, following up on a line Heath Ledger’s Joker espoused: “This city deserves a better class of criminal.” And as it turns out, WB agreed with that sentiment, as the studio apparently pushed Nolan to use the Riddler in his third Batman movie. In retrospect that is a bit odd since, generally speaking, when most comic book nerds think of the villains who pose the greatest threat to Batman, Bane always rounds out the top five or 10 by virtue of being the one baddie to “Break the Bat.” Yet after Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight thrillingly ended on the noble rush of Bruce Wayne riding into the night, accepting he was not the hero Gotham needed, no fan (nor apparently many Warners executives) anticipated the villain of Nolan’s inevitable sequel to be Bane, the beefy steroid-juicer with an affinity for Lucha libre masks.Īnecdotally, I recall that in the early days of social media, there was a lot of chatter among comic book fans that the villain should be evil psychologist Hugo Strange, who could’ve picked up where The Dark Knight left off, with the Gotham Police Department turning to a man they didn’t fully understand to catch the Bat.
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