UPDATE: After speaking with various people attached to The Dark Knight Rises and seeing Steve’s article on Collider, the update to this story below is that it was wrong. The files that were given to IMAX were different files but were the exact same version of the visuals and audio mix so we can confirm that Warner Bros. haven’t changed a thing on Bane’s voice or anything else for that matter.

Clear as mud!

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When some fans were treated to a six-minute prologue of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises on select IMAX screens last month, the thing that got people talking the most about was that Bane’s (Tom Hardy) dialogue was very hard to understand.

However, Nolan recently commented that he had no plans to rework Bane’s dialogue, despite the fact that complaint was universal and that fans seemed to be very concerned about the matter. He said he wasn’t opposed to “altering the sounds slightly” but he refused to “rework it completely.”

A source has now told Collider that Warner Bros. has sent out a new audio mix for The Dark Knight Rises prologue to IMAX theaters. But the dialogue hasn’t been reworked as was original reported, it has only been slightly cleaned up to make Bane’s dialogue much easier to understand.

The source said: “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.”

So Nolan seems to be sticking to his original statement saying that he will not be reworking Bane’s dialogue, but at least he’s done something to the help the audience enjoy the film without having to concentrate solely on trying to decipher Bane’s muffled words.

When asked how much clearer Bane’s dialogue is now compared to when we first heard it, the source said: “40-50%, because he’s no longer being overpowered by the background noise that drowned him out before.”

The Dark Knight Rises also stars Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Gary Oldman, and is set to be released on 20th July.