The deleted scene that almost gave ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ an X-rating: “It was sickening”
In the panorama of modern superhero films, The Dark Knight Rises holds a uniquely intricate legacy. Released in 2012, the movie had monumental shoes to fill, serving as a successor to The Dark Knight, a movie that not only set an extraordinarily high bar for the genre but also won Heath Ledger a posthumous Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
Yet, despite the Nolan trilogy’s foray into the darker, more violent aspects of Batman’s persona, it was a deleted scene in The Dark Knight Rises that almost tipped the scales, pushing the film into adult-only territory. The movies had never held their punches regarding on-screen violence, with the countless beatings, the death by pencil or the disfiguration of Harvey Dent’s face in The Dark Knight.
The third film, often regarded as the weakest link in the trilogy, even showed Bane snapping Batman’s spine within the movie’s first half. But one relatively minor moment nearly crossed the line – in Nolan’s eyes, anyway. Matthew Modine, who portrayed Peter Foley, disclosed to Cinema Blend that one specific scene almost cost the movie its wider audience.
“He cut my death scene out of Dark Knight Rises,” revealed Modine. “Because he said it was so violent that it would have gotten an NC-17 rating.” The scene involved Foley being gruesomely run over by a vehicle driven by Talia al Ghul, portrayed by Marion Cotillard. Modine described the original sequence as a chilling display of violence, one that made even Nolan’s face turn white on set.
Modine further elaborated, “The guy that was doubling me got hit by the car. They had ropes to pull him into the air, but he went up, and they dropped him from about 15 feet… the sound of his body hitting the cobblestone street… it was sickening.” Achieving an NC-17 rating could have been a financial death knell for the film, limiting its audience to those over 17 and making it a risky investment for studios.
This isn’t surprising given that the NC-17 rating evolved from the original X-rating, which had become synonymous with adult-only content of a much sleazier variety. As superhero narratives, notably Logan and Joker, continue to flirt with darker themes and violent, gorier subject matter, we can’t help but wonder if we’re inching closer to the first NC-17-rated mainstream superhero movie.
Could Matt Reeves’ upcoming Batman: Part Two, starring Robert Pattinson once again as the Bat, be the one to cross that line? After all, audiences seem willing to explore increasingly complex and adult themes within the superhero genre. It just depends on how far the filmmakers are willing to go to depict these iconic characters’ complex, darker shades – and to show the violent consequences in all its X-rated and bloody gory.
