Matt Reeves’ The Batman had a couple of twists and big reveals, and one of them regarding Gotham City’s criminal underworld ended up paying off a joke from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. After the failure of Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, the Caped Crusader made a successful return in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, with the second installment, The Dark Knight, considered one of the best superhero movies ever made. The Dark Knight saw Batman (Christian Bale) dealing with the Joker (Heath Ledger), who arrived at Gotham City to unleash chaos while Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) tried to dismantle organized crime.
After the DCEU’s version of Batman (played by Ben Affleck), Warner brought a younger version of the Caped Crusader in The Batman. This Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattison) is in his second year of fighting crime in Gotham, and alongside James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) and the GCPD, he goes after a mysterious serial killer known as The Riddler (Paul Dano). This leads Batman into Gotham’s criminal underworld, led by Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) and Oswald Cobblepot/Penguin (Colin Farrell), where he learned the truth about how it actually operates, and this big twist paid off one Dark Knight joke thanks to Sal Maroni and Carmine Falcone.
The Batman’s Falcone Twist Was A Maroni Joke In The Dark Knight
Harvey Dent makes his first appearance in The Dark Knight when he arrives late to a trial, where he and his team are prosecuting crime boss Salvatore Maroni (Eric Roberts), who took over the Falcone crime family after Batman Begins. As Dent interrogates his witness, the trial takes a turn as his witness contradicts his earlier statements and claims that Maroni isn’t the leader of the crime family and he’s just the fall guy, and says he is the real leader, which makes everyone in the room laugh. The Batman mirrored this with its twist in Falcone’s (John Turturro) story, only this time it wasn’t a joke and the story got very dark.
In The Batman, the audience is led to believe that the Penguin was the informant who gave the GCPD information that led to a historic drug bust that ended Salvatore Maroni’s operation, after which his operation transferred to Falcone. In the third act of The Batman, it was revealed that Falcone was the informant, and he set up Maroni so he could rise to power and control the city, with the help of a bunch of corrupt politicians and police officers. In this case, Maroni truly was the fall guy, but with dangerous consequences that further proved that the Gotham City system is broken.
What Happened To Carmine Falcone After Batman Begins?
Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) was one of the villains in Batman Begins, as he controlled Gotham City, but his fall was thanks to one of his allies: Jonathan Crane a.k.a. Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy). Falcone helped Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson) and Crane smuggle the Fear Toxin into Gotham, but he was caught by Batman and arrested. In prison, during a session with Crane, Falcone tried to blackmail Crane, who then used the Fear Toxin on him, leaving him in a wild state of psychosis. As ordered by Crane, Falcone was sent to Arkham Asylum, and as mentioned in The Dark Knight, he was still awaiting trial, meaning he didn’t escape when the League of Shadows released its inmates.
