The dust has settled, the smoke has cleared, and we’ve all had two weeks to digest what Christopher Nolan delivered for the bookending instalment of his Dark Knight trilogy. We know all the answers now, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to forget some of the more absurd, even laughable theories fielded our way over the last four years since Batman rode off into exile at the end of The Dark Knight.

Here are the craziest rumours we heard about The Dark Knight Rises, and what the truth in fact turned out to be.

1. The Lazarus Pit

Speculation: Pretty much as soon as production on Rises began, set pictures began leaking out from the film’s first set, in Jodhpur, India. Surreptitiously-taken images of crew members working on the set emerged, centred around a strange circular construct that seemed to involve green screen, post-production CGI elements.

When the above picture leaked onto the web, rumours quickly began to swirl that Christopher Nolan was going to inject a taste of the supernatural into his until-now mostly grounded, fairly plausible take on the Caped Crusader. This circular element, it was theorised, was to be the CGI entrance to the Lazarus Pit, a mystical body of water that is used to rejuvenate Ra’s al Ghul in the Batman mythos. Given that we already knew about Bane appearing in the film, information had already begun to leak out about the possible appearance of Talia Al Ghul in The Dark Knight Rises, and spies had spotted Liam Neeson trotting around on set, the theory did begin to gain some traction on Batman message boards all over the net.

Fact: Of course, we can now see that this circular opening is simply the exterior of Bane’s prison pit that young Talia Al Ghul and later, Bruce Wayne, escape from, with a CGI opening being used likely for logistical reasons (while an entirely different location is used for the prison interior). A year ago, it seemed oddly plausible that the Lazarus Pit might be featuring in Rises, and in the present, we can now all have a good laugh at ourselves and how far the net nerds managed to overreach.

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