Originally, the Joker was to return in “The Dark Knight Rises”. But following the untimely death of Heath Ledger, filmmaker Christopher Nolan was forced to revise his plans. Find out what happened to the character.
The Dark Knight Rises: the muscular conclusion of the saga Batman
After Batman Begins and the incredible The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan, and Christian Bale are back to conclude the iconic trilogy of Batman with The Dark Knight Rises. An impressive third episode within particular is Tom Hardy as Bane, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Blake, and Anne Hathaway as Catwoman. Obviously, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, and Morgan Freeman are all back in their respective roles.
The Dark Knight Rises was a huge box office success with over $1 billion in revenue. The feature film still remains the film today Batman who made the best start on French soil. A success that owes a lot to Tom Hardy, unforgettable as Bane. However, initially, The Dark Knight Rises was to have a totally different plot and had to bring the Joker back to center stage.
A whole new story
Heath Ledger sadly passed away on January 22, 2008shortly before the release of The Dark Knight, of an overdose, in circumstances that are still quite unclear today. The Joker had to be again the big bad guy The Dark Knight Rises. The end of The Dark Knight hinted that the Prince of Crime would come back to haunt Batman. But the untimely passing of Heath Ledger prompted Christopher Nolan to change his plans. No way for him to cast a new actor in the skin of the Joker, or to bring Heath Ledger back digitally in the film. No, we had to find another option.
Forced to dismiss the Joker, Christopher Nolan must start on a completely new basis. For a while, he imagines a story with The Riddler. The studio insists The Riddler is Batman’s next nemesis, and it even sees Leonardo DiCaprio play him. But Nolan believes that this character is too close to the Joker, and prefers to go to other horizons. It was then that the screenwriter David S. Goyer proposes Bane to Christopher Nolan. A proposal that did not really convince the filmmaker at first glance:
The first time I proposed that the villain be Bane, Chris Nolan wanted to strangle me because he thought the character was stupid, but for the story we wanted to tell, he was the only one that made sense. We wanted to tell the story of an aging, physically frail Bruce Wayne and we wanted him to face someone physically better than him. We remade Rocky III, literally.
But suddenly, what has become of the Joker in the Batman universe?
The Joker’s very name is never addressed in the film. It’s as if the evil clown had totally evaporated from the universe, Batman. Christopher Nolan offers only one only reference to the famous Nemesis of the Dark Knight, the time of a short scene. At the time of the inauguration of the statue of Batman in Gotham, the camera rises in the air, and the composition of the individuals present during this commemoration form the face of the joker. This is the one and only time Chris Nolan references the Joker. But then, what became of it?
We can find some answers in the novelization of The Dark Knight Rises by Greg Cox. It is told that following the Dent law, many criminals pleaded insanity to obtain reduced sentences. Arkham Asylum is therefore abandoned and a penitentiary named Blackgate becomes a haven for criminals. Obviously, too dangerous to be moved, only the Joker remains in Arkham under close surveillance:
The worst of the worst were sent to Blackgate, except for the Joker who is rumored to have been imprisoned in Arkham and remains its sole occupant. Or maybe he escaped? Nobody knows.
Apparently, the Joker would therefore be rotting in the depths of Arkham Asylum. A more than deserved outcome for this demonic character…
