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Batman: Knightfall is one of the most iconic Batman stories ever told. The 1993 comic arc introduced the brilliant steroid-enhanced villain Bane, who immediately established himself as an S-Tier supervillain by brutally breaking Batman’s back. Christopher Nolan adapted part of the plot of Knightfall in his 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises, but Warner Bros. Animation is currently in the middle of a far more faithful adaptation, and the first movie in the Batman: Knightfall trilogy is available now on VOD.
“Everybody on this team really respects Nolan and really enjoys that trilogy, but we are still comic book nerds, and so when there are big derivations from the comic book source, we get a little bit frustrated,” Knightfall producer Jim Krieg tells Polygon. “This felt like an opportunity to tell the Bane story we’ve known for a long time from comic books for an audience that may not be familiar with it.”
Krieg wanted to add more depth to Bane’s character, depicting his brutal upbringing in a prison in Santa Prisca, where he was experimented on with the super-steroid Venom. After breaking out, Bane travels to Gotham and blows up Arkham Asylum to release Batman’s rogues gallery. The Caped Crusader forgoes sleep for days as he tries to round up all the criminals, a process that leaves him mentally and physically drained.
“Bane’s not just a pile of steroided muscles, but actually a real calculating machine,” Krieg says. “He doesn’t beat Batman with his strength, but with his strategy of wearing him down bit by bit. It feels like Bane has earned this victory at the end of Part 1. I think that’s much more satisfying than, he’s just so strong he beats the crap out of Batman.”
An agonizing process
Producing a faithful adaptation of a comic series that ran for more than a year inevitably meant cutting a lot of material, which Krieg said was an “agonizing process.” One of the biggest challenges of Batman: Knightfall – Part 1 was introducing not just Bane but the religious vigilante Azrael (aka Jean-Paul Valley Jr.), who plays a major role in the rest of the storyline. The character first appeared in the 1992 comic Batman: Sword of Azrael and was teaming up with Batman and Robin by the time the Knightfall arc began in 1993.
“We needed to give some context to that, because you can’t just have this dude in the Batcave with Tim and Alfred, but obviously we weren’t going to be able to adapt the entire story of the Sword of Azrael,” supervising producer Rick Morales tells Polygon. “We wanted to show the world that Azrael operates in and set up the struggles that he’s going to have in the next few films. This movie is in a lot of ways Bane’s film, and going forward we’re going to focus a little bit more on Jean-Paul.”
Azrael gets a dramatic introduction in the first moments of the film, where he unleashes his fiery wrath on a group of human traffickers. Morales has produced several Mortal Kombat movies for Warner, but he was surprised how gory the studio wanted him to get in a Batman film.
“We put together the first cut of the first act of the first film and sent that off to the executives to shoot us back notes, and one of the notes was, ‘Hey, I think we can burn this guy’s face off here and show it,’” Morales says. “I got the green light to go more intense and go a little bit more violent with this. I don’t want to say it’s not gratuitous. It is, but it’s purposeful. It’s story-driven. Batman’s not slicing people’s faces off. He’s not impaling people. He’s beating people up and getting a little bloody. It’s Azrael that’s killing, that’s being super violent, and that is showing the juxtaposition between their two philosophies.”
Knightfall – Part 1 just barely touches on Azrael’s complicated backstory, which is connected to the Knights Templar. Part 2 will delve further into his violent past.
“Azrael is a little like the Boba Fett of the Batverse,” Krieg says. “He’s an image that people know, but they don’t know what his story is. Hopefully people will know him as well as they know the Joker at the end of this series and want to see more from him.”
The original Knightfall comic was released at a time when DC was trying to attract readers with edgy stories like The Death of Superman. Morales worked with Studio Mir (The Legend of Korra, X-Men ’97) to bring the tone and aesthetics of the time to the film.
“Everybody’s buff,” he says. “Even Tim, the 15-year-old boy, has muscles on muscles. In the ‘90s, everything was pushed to the extreme — big and bold and angry. All the superheroes were getting shoulder pads and pouches and big guns. Batman isn’t cool enough as he is. He needed to have spikes and metal gauntlets. I really wanted to lean into that.”
Batman: Knightfall is available to rent on Apple TV and Prime Video.
