Without a doubt, Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ is one of the anticipated films of 2012. However, last month, when some fans were treated to a six minute prologue of the film at IMAX theaters, many were unhappy. The prologue featured the appearance of Bane as he hijacked a plane in mid-air. The action was amazing! However, many fans were unhappy with Bane’s voice. Bane (played by Tom Hardy) wears a mask over his mouth. This caused many fans to claim that his dialogue was hard to understand. When ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ trailer hit the web a couple of weeks ago, more fans began to grumble about the same issue.

Upon hearing the complaints, director Christopher Nolan made it abundantly clear that he had no plans to change Bane’s voice or dialogue in the film. He said at the time that he had no problem “altering the sounds slightly” but that the voice of Bane that fans heard in the prologue and the trailer was what they were going to hear in the finished film.

Today, an unnamed source has come forward and announced that a new version of the prologue has been released to IMAX theaters with remixed audio. Here’s what the source had to say of the remixed version:

“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 posted an image of a letter that WB sent to IMAX theaters along with the new audio (below), which seems to corroborate the info that there is indeed a new version of the ‘Dark Knight Rises’ trailer out there somewhere. Whether this will change the impression that fans have over Bane’s voice remains to be seen.

Either way, it’s kind of nice to see that Nolan stuck to his guns and didn’t go back and redub all of Bane’s dialogue, as some fans were hoping. The audio change allows Nolan to preserve his original vision for the film and make the fans happy at the same time.

What do you think? Did you see the ‘Dark Knight Rises’ prologue or trailer and have any issue with understanding what Bane was saying? Would changing the audio make you more or less excited to see the movie? Do you think that Nolan has buckled to fan pressure with this audio change?

Update: Dave Itzkoff, a writer for the New York Times, tweeted earlier today: “Warner Bros. says ‘no truth’ to reports of new Dark Knight Rises prologue trailers going out with fixed Bane audio.” So it seems as if there is no truth to this whole story… maybe. What about the letter from WB? Is it faked?