Chris Nolan Remixes THE DARK KNIGHT RISES Audio To Fix Tom Hardy's Bane Voice

By Matt Holmes / January 22, 2013

As soon as The Dark Knight Rises's six minutes long prologue screened for press at the beginning of last month there were two common responses amongst reporters. One, that the prologue was frikkin' awesome and two, that most couldn't understand just what the blooming heck Tom Hardy was saying as the villain Bane. Hilariously, a few of the reporters blamed Hardy's difficult British accent, but the more reasonable reviews blamed it on the muffling of the mask and the heavy background noise. The reports of the Bane audio problem became so widespread, especially shortly after the release of the prologue to the general public (well as long as you were in the vicinity of a 70mm IMAX screen anyway but that's another issue) and the first full length trailer which carried the same problem that Warner Bros. and director Christopher Nolan had a real issue on their hands. With over half a year left before the release of The Dark Knight Rises in theatres on July 20th 2012, the problem had plenty of time to be resolved but WB weren't liking the bad publicity and have corrected the issue early. Collider reports from a source close to WB that a new audio mix of the prologue has been sent to IMAX theatres this week...

A friend of mine who is an IMAX projectionist told me they received a new soundtrack for the Dark Knight Rises prologue. He said it€™s now a combo soundtrack with Mission: Impossible €“ Ghost Protocol, but the cool thing about this is that they€™ve cleaned up the dialogue. They€™ve gone in and lowered the background noise of the plane and other things, thus making Bane€™s dialogue clearer and more understandable. He asked some people after they left the movie if they could understand Bane and they all said they had no issue understanding him, and were excited for the movie.

Collider's source claims as much as 50% of the background noise and Hans Zimmer's score has been reduced and now Bane's villainous words can be heard in all their glory! Interestingly Chris Nolan said when the problem was first muted that he would be willing to think about €œaltering the sounds slightly€ on Bane's voice but he refused to €œrework it completely.€ But it does sound like he has done considerable work on the audio after all. Have you witnessed the prologue in the past few days? Have you noticed any difference with Tom Hardy's voice?