Batman: Could A Bane Solo Movie Work?

Rumor has dropped that The Batman sequel could feature Bane as its villain. That was pretty surprising notion; Bane was the last villain we saw in a major Batman solo film, played by Tom Hardy in Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2011). While the debate about bringing Bane back for The Batman 2, is one to be had, there was also an interesting note to that same rumor: Warner Bros. had considered - and ultimately passed on - a Bane solo movie. During the recent ComicBook Nation podcast host Kofi Outlaw and guests Jim Viscardi, Connor Casey, and Nicole Drum tackled the question:

Could a DC Bane solo movie actually be something as successful as Joker?

ComicBook Nation producer Jim Viscardi wasn't into the idea, feeling that a Bane movie would be much less Joker, and more generic comic book spinoff like Sony's Venom or Morbius:

"I think a Bane spinoff movie veers too much off into Sony Spiderman land for my liking... I don't think he's many people's favorite villain. Of course now everyone's gonna tell me, 'He's my favorite villain.' I like Bane but like I said: is he my favorite? No. I don't know if it's a story we need that, if they are going to make this as part of a larger franchise then it's definitely not... it would have tobe pretty radical of a shift I think for it to even make sense. But to me it just feels too much like, what Sony's trying to do with their Spiderman stuff."

WWE expert Connor Casey is skeptical - and with good reason. Both the '90s and 2000s Batman movie franchises tried to do Bane in live-action. Neither version (Batman & Robin, The Dark Knight Rises) was loyal to the comics, and neither was interesting enough to support a solo film franchise. As Connor put it:

"Well the problem with Bane in live-action is that we've seen two interpretations of them and neither of them are loyal to the comic version. Every version we've seen so far is a take. He's either a big lumbering brut performed by a WCW wrestler if you can believe it or whatever the hell they were trying to do with Tom Hardy. If they actually wanted to present the Knightfall version of him or even the Tom King version where we go into his background, behind Just how brutal his childhood was in Santa Prisca [Prison], that's something. I don't think that's enough for his own movie."

Host Kofi Outlaw had a vision for a successful Bane movie that he pitched: a mob-style origin of a crime boss's rise, with a Latin cultural backdrop:

"Vengeance of Bane is a great meaty story. That is one of the most fleshed-out DC comics villain stories in origins. You have on record and it's been developed, Tom King did a great job kind of also laying more depth into that and so I actually think you do have a kind of good story about some kid who grew up and had to be in this prison environment and kind of learn these things and that's only the first part.

You don't have to make a whole prison movie, but it's... set in Latin America, it's a different kind of culture. There's a lot of great stuff you could do. There's a lot of things in Bane like Luchadora culture, you could start to weave a little bit deeper into how he puts on the mask and creates the whole persona. All that stuff, it could be really good, and then kind of moving into how he becomes a crime boss and what he does to take over the streets and earn his gang - because I love Bane's gang from the '90s comics... Him just kind of forming a crazy crew... surviving and coming to power, as a mob boss. That's a cool story if you do it right... the deeper part of it would be just about the Latin world, the crime world, what that culture is with criminals in prison, and that whole different world that we don't know about."

Connor liked that idea well enough - with one major caveat: How can a Bane movie stand on its own without the villain's main obsession: The Batman?

"You saw in "Joker" how they had to fold themselves into a pretzel to try and get him involved in the story somehow so, how do you do that again? If he is just the villain in Batman 2, fine, but if it's his own movie, how does it not end with him being like, 'Oh hey there's this bat guy in Gotham...?'"

Kofi had an answer for that, too:

"...I would do it... not having the movie be about Batman; have it be about this guy who's obsessed with going from this place of weakness and vulnerability and being alone to kind of having power and his own family around him in the form of a gang, you know... You kind of just present that now that he's kind of on this ego high, that he is the man, you're like, 'Well there is this other dude out there who's actually, no criminal could stand up to,' and he's just like, 'Oh?' and that's your set up for that."

Nicole Drum had a much simpler answer: Just keep Bane as a villain in The Batman movies:

"...People are gonna come out because of Batman in addition to him being Bane but that said, as a villain in a sequel to "The Batman", I would be willing to check that out because... he makes for an interesting counterpoint to Batman because Batman is unbeatable. No one can really stand up to him and then there's Bane and we've seen Bane, Bane breaks Batman's back. So I feel like as a villain in a movie with Batman, he's much better suited to that than being on his own."

Would you watch a Bane solo movie like Joker? How about one set in The Batman universe?

ComicBook Nation airs every Wednesday and Friday - The Batman is waiting to resume production.