Each movie in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy had different villains, but there’s one who appeared in all movies, though not always as the main bad guy: Jonathan Crane a.k.a. Scarecrow, played by Cillian Murphy, but what happened to him after the events of The Dark Knight Rises? After a rough patch with Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin in 1997, the Caped Crusader returned to the big screen in Nolan’s Batman Begins, released in 2005. The movie explored the title hero’s origins and introduced Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne, as well as Liam Neeson as Ra’s al Ghul and Murphy’s Jonathan Crane.
The success of Batman Begins made way for a sequel, which arrived in 2008. Titled The Dark Knight, this second entry had the Joker (Heath Ledger) as the main villain, and the movie was so well received it’s regarded as one of the best superhero movies ever made. The final chapter in the trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, arrived in 2012 with Bane (Tom Hardy) and Talia al Ghul (Marion Cotillard) as the villains, and it also introduced Anne Hathaway as the new Selina Kyle/Catwoman. All movies in the Dark Knight trilogy counted with the presence of Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow, who was arrested at the beginning of The Dark Knight and made a surprise appearance in The Dark Knight Rises, after which his fate remained a mystery.
The Dark Knight Rises saw Bruce Wayne resuming his role as Batman as Bane threatened to destroy Gotham City through nuclear weapons. While Bruce was severely injured and sent to an underground prison far away from Gotham, Bane put his plans into motion, and after releasing the prisoners of Blackgate Penitentiary, he instated martial law and exiled and killed Gotham’s elite in kangaroo courts, which turned out to be presided over by none other than Crane. That was his only scene in The Dark Knight Rises and his fate was left unknown – however, it’s believed he was eventually arrested by the Gotham City Police Department after Bane and Talia al Ghul were killed and Batman flew away with the bomb that was supposed to destroy Gotham.
Speaking to GQ in 2019, during a break down of his most iconic characters so far, Cillian Murphy shared that there was a joke on the set of The Dark Knight Rises that Jonathan Crane is “the character that refuses to die”, and confirmed that he survived the events of the final movie in the Dark Knight trilogy. With that in mind, and as the people of Gotham regained control of the city once Bane was defeated and Batman “sacrificed” himself, Jonathan Crane surely spent the rest of his life in jail, and supposing there were no more villains wanting to take over the city and create chaos, he most likely didn’t have a way to escape this time.
Still, as the movies didn’t reveal what happened to Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow after the events of The Dark Knight Rises (nor has Christopher Nolan shed some light on this), his fate is somewhat open to interpretation, but there’s no doubt that he’s the villain of the trilogy that refused to die (it’s worth noting, however, that the Joker didn’t die either in The Dark Knight). Jonathan Crane’s presence through the Dark Knight trilogy was not only entertaining but also gives a lot of meaning to each movie and the trilogy as a whole, and it fits the character that his fate was left a mystery.