Last month’s rumors that The Dark Knight Rises might utilize the Occupy Wall Street movement as a stand-in for an angry Gotham City never quite materialized—and now that police have emptied Zuccotti Park, effectively causing everyone to just give up and agree everything’s all good now, it’s all but guaranteed that the only interactions between Batman and its displaced angry denizens will be in the doodles Frank Miller is currently scratching into all of his notebooks. But it came pretty damn close, at least according to Matthew Modine (who has a small role as the mysterious character “Nixon,” which we all know is just code for “The Riddler”). In an interview with Indiewire, Modine explained why the plans ultimately were scrapped:
The wisdom of Christopher Nolan and his incredible team was that, while it seemed like a good idea to give [the protestors] an opportunity for work, to give them money, it would send a terrible message. At the end of the day, we're making a movie. What's happening down there is more important than that. To co-opt what's happening there and around the country… we didn't want to trivialize it. It was more important to respect what they're doing than to do anything that could potentially trivialize the political situation downtown.
So it’s official, then: MTV and Jay-Z are the opposite of Batman.