Since the reveal of the late Heath Ledger as the Joker, Christopher Nolan and Warner Brothers Pictures have made liberal use of the Internet and the viral nature it contains for the Batman films.
Whether it was scavenger hunts that revealed new content or to mailing fictional copies of The Gotham Times, viral marketing was a huge part of the run-up to
The Dark Knight.
Now that production for
The Dark Knight Rises (TDKR), the third installment of Nolan's Batman series, is underway,
the viral marketing has begun again, this time, making impressive use of Twitter and hashtags. Following the strategy of the first campaign, the TDKR marketing crew revealed the villain early on, and like
the Ledger/Joker reveal, the initial image was obscured as individual pixels were peeled away.
The catalyst for the removal of these pixels was, of course, Twitter. Tweets that made use of the following hashtag -
#thefirerises - resulted in another pixel being removed. This continued until the image was entirely visible, and it gave us our first look at one of the movie's main adversaries, Bane. Played by
Tom Hardy, Bane is one of the more popular members of Batman's rogue's gallery, and Nolan's take on the character looks pretty damn good, much like Ledger and the Joker:
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