Christopher Nolan Cut Scene From ‘Dark Knight Rises’ That Was So Violent It Made Matthew Modine Sick

Christopher Nolan revitalised the Batman franchise by going darker and moodier than anyone before him, but it turns out things could have been even darker had they not been afraid of picking up an NC-17 rating for the Dark Knight Rises.

As with many comic book movies, DKR got away with a PG-13 rating, though that probably would not have been the case if the original death scene of Matthew Modine’s character (Gotham’s Deputy Police Commissioner Peter Foley) had remained in the final cut.

Here’s what Modine told the ReelBlend podcast:

He cut my death scene out of Dark Knight Rises. Because he said it was so violent that it would have gotten an NC-17 rating. … Marion Cotillard — after Bane dies and Batman, Chris [Bale] gets stabbed, she gets in one of those vehicles. She starts to drive away, and I’m shooting at her. And I got run over. All it does is, it just cuts, and I’m on the ground, dead. But it was so violent. The guy that was doubling me got hit by the car. They put a plexiglass thing on the front of [the car] and he got hit. They had ropes to pull him into the air, but he went up and they dropped him from about 15 feet, and the sound of his body hitting the cobblestone street in front of the New York Stock Exchange, it was sickening. And I remember I looked at Christopher Nolan when we shot it and his face was white. He was like, ‘OK, let’s move on. We got that.’ But it was like, ‘Oh my God, is that guy going to get up? Is he okay?’ But [Nolan] said that if he would have put it in the movie, it would’ve got an NC-17 rating because it was so violent.

Yikes. That does sound quite graphic. Imagine how pissed off the stunt guy is who had to go through that only to be told the scene won’t be making it into the actual film? I know he got paid and all but still – that’s got to be a bummer knowing that no one will ever see it.

Would The Dark Knight Rises have been a better movie with an NC-17 or even an R rating? The argument is that PG-13 allows for a much bigger audience, but look at films like Joker, Deadpool & Passion of the Christ. All rated R and raked in billions of dollars. I guess maybe they’re the exceptions to the rule. Either way, would be cool to get this missing scene online at some point so we might see what could’ve been.

Never forget: