Warner Bros. and the producers of the currently-filming The Dark Knight Rises have all earned major pussy points for deciding against filming a scene that would have used the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park as a backdrop. Because of this one presumably brief scene TDKR would have been more than just another corporate-money-grab-on-the-back-of-a-comic-book-franchise, but now it’s back to square one.

If director Chris Nolan was more of a man, he would have stood up to his producers and said “no, no…this is important…we have to shoot there.”

A Dark Knight Rises insider has told me that a Zuccotti Park shot was being planned for next week, but

Entertainment Weekly’s Aly Semigran reports as follows: “While Christopher Nolan will begin filming portions of The Dark Knight Rises in New York City over the span of the next two weeks, a Warner Bros., rep tells EW that there are no plans to shoot in Zuccotti Park, the home base for the OWS movement.

“After an open casting call for NYC extras for the project hit the web, rumors swirled that the project could be filming very close to, if not directly in, Zuccotti Park. Last week an anonymous source told the LA Times, ‘Cast members have been told the shoot could include scenes shot at the Occupy Wall Street protests’ and that Nolan could be using ‘the protests as a backdrop or a stand-in for something that already exists in the film,’ but that simply doesn’t seem to be the case.”