RUMOR Joseph Gordon Levit to play "Holiday" in The Dark Night rises

Joseph-Gordon Levit AKA Arthur from Inception is rumored to play the Holiday Killer in Nolan's 3rd Batman film The Dark Knight Rises.

For those of you not in the know, the Holiday Killer was the main antagonist in the excellent Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale Batman graphic novel The Long Halloween. "Holiday" was a serial killer hitting mob leaders and officers on holidays who left behind a corresponding novelty as a calling card. His actions instigate an all-out war between the Mob and Batman's Rouges Gallery.

So what's the implications for The Dark Knight Rises? Well for me, with the inclusion of both Tom Hardy and Anne Hathaway as Bane and Catwoman, respectively tells me that Nolan is trying something especially unique for the new Batman film. Again, for those not in the know, Bane was a Genius Bruiser luchador-inspired hitman who, while brilliant in his normal form, became superhumanly strong once he took special steroids. He's also one of the very few to successfully incapacitate Batman by breaking his back in Knightfall. He's a relatively obscure character, outside of those of us who watched Batman: The Animated Series as kids, but Holiday is a much more obscure character in comparison.

My guess is it's Nolan's move to curry favor with the hardcore Bat-fans out there after he...ahem...underused Scarecrow in Batman Begins. By adding two obscure characters in the mix, it's his way of both further accommodating his realistic style and to appeal to the hardcore crowd.

A note on Nolan's "realistic" style: his style is much more of the subset hardboiled. Hardboiled, most commonly seen in the noir and cyberpunk subgenres, is characterized by having realistic grounding but enough wiggle room to accommodate stylization. It's why John Woo can do bullet time and those damn doves in his films or why Max Payne could use the heavy Norse analogies. While Nolan has consistently used the more conceivable villains and settings in his films, he still leaves enough room to allow his characters to beat the shit out of eachother and still bounce back for another go. This is why he's chosen Catwoman, Bane, and Holiday as opposed to the more fantastical/sci-fi villains such as Mr. Freeze or Poison Ivy.

My speculation is as follows: Holiday will be running around hitting mob targets in the first act. By the second act, we'll see Selena Kyle aka Catwoman lifting objects from the Falciones while they hire Bane to hit Holiday and /or Batman. Bane will sucessfuly break Batman's back (possibly early on in the seccond act), incapacitating Bats and leaving Gothom to the mercy of the mob. Now how it ends is contingent on where Nolan wants to go with the series:

• If this is his last film, Batman will rise to the occasion (hence the title) and defeat Bane and bring Holiday to justice, dying in the process. This will exhonerate him from taking the fall for Dent's murders and end the films on a bittersweet tone which, as seen in his previous films, is Nolan's style.
• If he's going for a fourth, Catwoman will take up the responsibility of being Gotham's de facto vigilante while Bats recuperates. See above how four will end.
  

In any case, I'm personally overjoyed of the implication of Holiday in the film, at the very least Levit will be cast. The Long Halloween is my personal favorite graphic novel: right above Watchmen on my list. I love Loeb's noir inspired style and influences and how Sale's art accommodates it perfectly. We'll see how Nolan plays this one, but in the meantime I'm looking even more forward to The Dark Knight Rises.