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Rumor: Dark Knight Rises Blu-ray includes 30 minutes of new footage

Bane -- The Dark Knight Rises

There’s a new rumor swirling about the Internet that claims the upcoming Blu-ray release of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Rises will include a full half-hour of footage originally cut from the film for its theatrical release. If that seems like the kind of thing Nolan and the suits at Warner Bros. would likely do, that’s because this concept is not all that uncommon. We already told you about the upcoming Blu-ray release of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers which includes a massive amount of superfluous footage, and the idea of an extended “Director’s Cut” of any given movie is nearly as old as theatrical film releases themselves.

What makes this particular rumor so intriguing though, is that despite a lack of official confirmation that this extra footage might find its way onto a Blu-ray disc, the arguments supporting the idea are very convincing. Those of you who read us regularly may recall a piece we published last month which claimed that Bane’s origin story was originally intended to be a significant part of The Dark Knight Rises, but that it was removed during the movie’s editing process. At the time we posited the idea that this extra content might appear on the movie’s inevitable Blu-ray release, both because that sort of thing is increasingly common, and because Nolan’s departure from making superhero movies will likely push Warner Bros. to “market any extraneous scraps from the movie that were left on the cutting room floor.”

Apparently that idea made a lot of sense to the fine people over at Nuke The Fridge. Not only do they make the same claim in an article published earlier today, but they also claim to have corroboration from an unnamed, supposedly reliable insider source. While that alone wouldn’t be enough to convince us of this rumor’s validity, in reporting on NTF’s claims, the likewise fine people at Collider have offered a crucial thought on the topic:

Nolan is the effective spokesperson of IMAX.  One downside to his love of the format is the time limitation, and that 165-minute runtime pushes right up against the limit of what can fit on 70mm IMAX prints.  So there is a plausible reason for this to be the one Nolan film that could not fit every scene he wanted.

If — and we’re still working in the hypothetical here — Nolan had been stymied in his attempts to tell the full story of The Dark Knight Rises by a physical limitation of his beloved IMAX format, it would only make sense to include the full version of the film on Blu-ray. Those discs have massive capacity, and if the excised footage is just lying around, why wouldn’t Nolan (and more importantly Warner Bros.) want to include it on the film’s official home release? That extra content both appeases fans who want to see more of Nolan’s Batman universe and offers a handy bullet point for the PR people who have to sell the Blu-ray to your average consumer.

Again, this is all rumor and speculation, but we’re growing increasingly inclined to believe the whole thing. Please, draw your own conclusions.

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