Christopher Nolan drops a bomb shell

OK, I'm officially excited for this. Great idea. Makes it more unnecessary to bring back the Joker for this go around at least, since a Joker plot line with Harley Quinn wouldn't exactly work 8 years after he's arrested, but it creates room for a fourth one where the Joker is spurt back into insanity once he finds out that Batman is back like in "The Dark Knight Returns". Granted I don't want a forth one though.

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creates room for a fourth one

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I thought Nolan had said in no uncertain terms that this would be his last Batman film.

Supposedly the prologue happens right after the events of TDK.

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Batman fights Bane, beats him and leaves him badly injured,

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So Batman quit for all those years?

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Yeah. Did so in The Dark Knight Returns, so it doesn't surprise me Nolan took this route as well.

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The Dark Knight Rises picks up eight years after the events of The Dark Knight

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Nolan on specifically why he used Bane and not the Riddler

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"The world of Batman, indeed the world of all graphic novels, deals with archetypes," he says, "And there's a very real sense in which The Joker is an extreme and an absolute and Batman is an extreme and an absolute. So whe you're looking to continue the story - in this case finish Bruce Wayne and Batman's story, as we see it - then you certainly don't want a watered-down version of a character you've already done. You want a different archetype. What Bane represents in the comics is the ultimate physical villain."

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Perfectly put. Go with a completely different approach if you aren't using the Joker, not a watered down version of him. I was excited about Bane and thought from the start that going with Bane and the League of Shadows again was the best route to take the story. Like Freax though, I'm not sold on Catwoman yet.

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fair or unfair the image most people have of bane is from Batman and Robin...I think nolan will fix that.

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Fortunately he was ridiculously forgettable. I'd honestly say that 90% of America still doesn't know who Bane is. When I was 9 or so when Batman and Robin was released, I had no idea who Bane was really. He just seemed like a thug to me.

Here's some more information and a better shot of Bane

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"It's really all about finishing Batman and Bruce Wayne's story. We left him in a very precarious place. Perhaps surprisingly for some people, our story picks up quite a bit later, eight years after The Dark Knight. So he's an older Bruce Wayne; he's not in a great state.

"With Bane, we're looking to give Batman a challenge he hasn't had before. With our choice of villain and with our choice of story we're testing Batman both physically as well as mentally."

Speaking of physical challenges, what can Tom Hardy tell us about Bane? "He's brutal. Brutal. He's a big dude who's incredibly clinical, in the fact that he has a result-based and oriented fighting style. It's not about fighting. It's about carnage. The style is heavy-handed, heavy-footed, it's nasty. Anything from small-joint manipulation to crushing skulls, crushing rib cages, stamping on shins and knees and necks and collarbones and snapping heads off and tearing his fists through chests, ripping out spinal columns. He is a terrorist in mentality as well as brutal action."

Costume designer Lindy Hemming also lets drop a few clues to his backstory as she talks about Bane's look. On the mask, she says, "He was injured early in his story. He's suffering from pain and needs gas to survive. He can't survive the pain without the mask. The pipes from the mask go back along his jawline and feed into the thing at his back, where there are two cannisters."

"What our IMAX prologue is aiming at showing is that Bane's a very different kind of villain than Batman has faced before in our films," Nolan continues, "He's a great sort of movie monster, but with an incredible brain, and that was a side of him that hadn't been tapped before. Because the stories from the comics are very epic and very evocative - very much in the way that Bruce Wayne's origin story is epic and evocative. We were looking to really parallel that with our choice of villain. So he is a worthy adversary."

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I'm really liking what I'm hearing, I just want to know why the hell Catwoman would have anything to do with this.