Bane said what?

Maybe if he took that thing off his mouth ...

First, a confession. As any friend will tell you, I am hard of hearing, especially on my right side. As a result, I sometimes watch DVDs at home with the closed captioning turned on. That's part of the reason that the latest news about "The Dark Knight Rises" caught my ear (sorry).

I found the voice of the villain Bane, portrayed by Tom Hardy, difficult to understand in the early clips of the movie. At first, I thought it might just be me. Then I read other people saying the same thing.

Multiple Internet sources - Adam Chitwood of collider.com posted the "exclusive" - are reporting that negative feedback about the sound caused Warner Bros. to distribute a remix of the film's prologue that is being shown in IMAX theaters:

“A friend of mine who is an IMAX projectionist told me they received a new soundtrack for the Dark Knight Rises prologue. He said it’s now a combo soundtrack with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, but the cool thing about this is that they’ve cleaned up the dialogue. They’ve gone in and lowered the background noise of the plane and other things, thus making Bane’s dialogue clearer and more understandable. He asked some people after they left the movie if they could understand Bane and they all said they had no issue understanding him, and were excited for the movie.”

Collider also published a copy of a letter being sent to IMAX theaters about the fix.

Seems simple enough. After all, who in their right mind would not want to clean up the dialogue so that viewers can understand what one of the main characters is saying?

Director Christopher Nolan, for one, is not crazy about the idea. He reportedly was opposed to reworking Bane's voice, although not against adjusting other sound in the mix.

Then, shortly after the Collider story appeared, the site was contacted by the studio:

Warner Bros as contacted me and said that our story is absolutely not true.

Maybe I will just wait for the DVD and watch the closed captioning. Well, I would if I had any willpower.