How A Quick Scene In 'The Batman' Sets Up Bane

The Batman had a ton of villains: the Riddler, the Penguin, the Joker (or his forehead, unless you count the deleted scene), the Carmine Falcone, and the two poor goons tasked with guarding the door of that club Batman keeps crashing. But now that the movie is coming out in a format that's easier to pause than a cinema projector, more people will realize there was a short tease for the classic Bat-enemy whose last cinematic interpretation predicted 2020s fashion: Bane. 

The scene in question happens near the end, when Robert Pattinson's Batman is fighting an army of the Riddler's Twitch subscribers. Just as the exhausted Battinson seems to be losing the fight, he injects himself with a substance that lets him get up and beat the crap out of one of the Riddler simps. A lot of viewers assumed that this was a simple adrenaline shot, but look at the scene again: 

The first curious thing about it is that the substance Batman injects himself with is green -- which is also the color of a drug Batman briefly dabbled with in the comics. In 1991, after failing to save a kidnapped girl because he wasn't strong enough to lift some boulders, Batman starts taking a drug called "venom" that basically turns him into Popeye after eating spinach. At first, the drug comes in the form of green pills, but then the scientist who created it synthesizes a stronger liquid formula. Batman feels like he's become much more effective at crime-fighting since he's been taking venom; the only problem is that it's also been driving him psychotic. 

If the substance in the movie was venom, that would explain why Batman loses his mind when he injects it; for a moment there, it really looks like he's gonna beat Riddler's online buddy to death until the cops intervene. 

In the comics, after realizing he's become addicted to venom, Batman locks himself up in the Batcave for an entire month to kick the habit. Venom's creator dies in the same storyline, but later on, his formula is used to perform experiments on prisoners on the Caribbean island of Santa Prisca. The only one of those prisoners to survive the experiments escapes the island and starts wearing a costume rigged with a series of tubes that let him shoot up more venom whenever he wants. Oh, and he also starts calling himself Bane and gets obsessed with "breaking Batman," literally. Fun fact: according to the DC Wiki, using venom might cause impotence. 

Despite not having the greatest interpretation of Bane ever, even Batman & Robin remained faithful to the part about the venom being neon green, so it's hard to believe The Batman director Matt Reeves wouldn't know about it. It's either that or Reeves is planning to mutate Batman into a turtle in a future film.

Another curious thing about venom are the parallels with the Spider-Man villain of the same name: both started as something the hero used to aid in their superhero career before stopping because it was turning them into violent jerks, eventually leading to the creation of an iconic 1990s villain with a black, white, and red color scheme ... 

... who ended up being played by Tom Hardy in a 2010s movie. This means DC owes us a scene of Christian Bale shooting up venom, getting an emo haircut, and doing cringey dances. Uh, spoilers for the next Pattinson movie, maybe? 

Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment on every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com. 

Top image: Warner Bros. Pictures