Even if you've never read any of the Batman comics, as I have, you've probably picked up on a few things about Bane, the menacing villain that Tom Hardy will play in next summer's The Dark Knight Rises. Unlike more famous Batman foes like the Joker or the Penguin or Two-Face, Bane's main strength is in being physically terrifying, able to break and destroy almost anything that gets in his way, including Batman. In a famous moment from the 1993 "The Man Who Broke The Bat" issue of the comics, Bane leans Batman over his knee and breaks his back, rendering the superhero a paraplegic.

It's unclear if this grim scenario will take place in The Dark Knight Rises, or if Christopher Nolan will want to leave his hero intact at the end of the final Batman film he intends to direct. But in a behind-the-scenes photo from the set, posted at Yidio, Tom Hardy is directly referencing the moment with a crew member. Check out the set photo below on the left, next to the image from the comics for reference.



Quite honestly, this set photo leads me to believe the moment is not in the movie, simply because Nolan's Batman sets are so tightly guarded that Hardy would never pose for a photo that revealed a potentially major plot point. Odds are Hardy is as familiar is the "break the bat" storyline as anyone-- he's a dedicated actor, after all, who surely did his research-- and is joking around about it on the set with the crew members who are all probably Batman fans themselves. You probably won't get to see Hardy's incarnation of Bane actually break the Bat…but is this set photo close enough? Hey, probably not, but it's a fun distraction while we wait for the actual movie to come out next July.