Meeting Tom Hardy as leather-bound terrorist Bane.

 
Batman is back and he wants his home to be on IMAX screens. That was the message from producer Emma Thomas in London today as she introduced a special screening of the 6 minute prologue to her husband Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises.
 
Accompanied by Josh Berger, President & Managing Director of Warner Bros. Entertainment UK, Thomas tub-thumped on behalf of the IMAX format before the screening began at BFI IMAX near Waterloo in South London. (It is the biggest screen in Britain.)
 
Nolan’s aim, she said, was “to make these movies as big and as immersive as they can be.” Imax, she added, was his “favourite format” in which to do so.
 
The Dark Knight (2008) featured around 20 minutes of IMAX footage. The new film (due to be released in July 2012) will have more than twice as much.
The prologue (which will show on selected IMAX screens alongside Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol) introduces the new Batman villain, muscle-bound terrorist leader Bane (Tom Hardy). The footage shows the masked Bane ostensibly being taken prisoner by a CIA operative (Aidan Gillen) but then turning the tables on his captors during a spectacular aerial sequence.
 
The Warner tactic of previewing the prologue and introducing the villain paid dividends with The Dark Knight in 2008, when the sequence showing the Joker (Heath Ledger) leading a bank heist was also shown in cinemas months before the film’s release. The Dark Knight went on to gross over a billion dollars.

 

 

 

t the box-office.