Yesterday Warner Bros started out on the long road to the release of The Dark Knight Rises by unveiling the first official production photo, an image of Tom Hardy as Bane which you can see below, and making the official movie website live. The marketing campaign for The Dark Knight was maybe the most inventive and entertaining I have ever seen; Fans were led on wild scavenger hunts across US cities nationwide, collecting clues which only when uploaded to the internet and put together made any sense. So by contrast, the mystery to unlock the photo was rather tame, but still no less inventive or crazy.
As I understand it, fans had to log on to http://thedarkknightrises.warnerbros.com/ and listen to an audio clip of a large group of people chanting, if the listener imported this clip into an audio programme a code could be deciphered, which read #thefirerises. Putting this in a twitter status a number of times then led to a link to the photo being linked to the users account. Yep, even Sherlock Holmes would have had a tough time with this one (I don’t think Sherlock Holmes would ever participate in drip-feed marketing campaigns, and I feel the mere suggestion cheapens the character – ED). The photo looks pretty cool; Hardy looks moody in low light showing off the huge amount of muscle he has gained to try and match the Bane we all know.
In what looks to be a big year of blockbuster releases (The Amazing Spiderman, The Avengers… etc) Warner Bros wants to make The Dark Knight Rises the biggest of them all in 2012, and with an estimated budget of $250 million, it could just be. Keep checking back to Good Comic Books for further news on The Dark Knight Rises.
Will Pond.
