10 Deleted Scenes Which Totally Change Classic Films

5. Batman Is The Villain Of The Dark Knight Rises

Warner Bros.

Christopher Nolan's finale to his Dark Knight trilogy, which took the campy comic book Batman and shoved him right into the real world, drew more heavily on contemporary events than even the previous entries in the series - which had previously touched on modern issues like surveillance culture, drones and people in clown make up dressing as clowns and blowing up hospitals. Whilst Tom Hardy's Bane may have been about as believable as a real-life figure as his accent was comprehensible, his tactics when taking control of Gotham City had some precedents.

The comparison between his taking down of the banks and organising an uprising of the city's browbeaten working class with the Occupy movement were usually in the form of criticism, as many critics saw Nolan as drawing a direct comparison between a radical political movement and a supervillain as being mildly distasteful, but still - it's there. Then there are people who claim the director was simply drawing on some imagery and concepts we were seeing in the news at the time without providing any particular commentary on it which, considering The Dark Knight is pretty much a total metaphor for post-9/11 America, sounds like a load of bull to us.

Well, turns out, The Dark Knight Rises may have been just as radical as the protesters it seemed to be throwing under the bus by making unflattering comparisons with international supervillains. The film opens with Gotham flourishing under the Dent Act, which has supposedly made the city crime-free and Batman happy to enjoy his retirement. Except a deleted scene reveals that the new laws are totally repressive and see people thrown in jail without trial, with just one excised exchange between Commissioner Gordon and Batman Begins villain Jonathan Crane - aka The Scarecrow - tipping Nolan's hand and revealing that the whole thing has actually been a criticism of authoritarian regimes and not a celebration of them. Quite a big change, that.

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Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/