Welcome to Dark Knight Station, the Hero Express‘s main stop for all the news on The Dark Knight Rises. We’ll keep you up to date on all the biggest bat-news coming straight from Gotham City.
Mind the gap and avoid the shadows; This stop is the Dark Knight Station for December 11th, 2011.
The Viral Marketing Campaign Revealed – (Splash page)
You probably remember that The Dark Knight really took advantage of the internet as a marketing tool, bringing fans closer to the movie and using their involvement to blend the movie’s world with reality in really creative ways. For fans it was a really surreal thing to be a part of; I remember being handed a Gotham City newspaper in downtown Toronto one day and reading it on the subway ride home. It made me giddy. So I kind of missed it when The Dark Knight Rises seemed to be going with a traditional, if not leak-filled, ad campaign.
But things have been moving along in the past few days, beginning last week with Wired‘s ‘leaked’ image of a CIA bulletin regarding a missing Russian physicist, and then this accompanying transcript between some unidentified militia and an unknown contact:
Following that, a third piece of the bulletin was released via mysterious Twitter account ‘@thefirerises‘:
The latest part of the missive gave fans mention of ‘Operation Early Bird’, sending them to discover the website of the same name. The page listed a series of numbers and a countdown clock, but they left it to the public to figure out what it meant. It didn’t take them long to do just that. When the clock reached zero, a map of North America and Europe popped up and internet users quickly discovered they were able to pinpoint locations for early screenings of the DKR prologue.
All in all, the campaign was much more subdued than the last movie’s massive undertaking, but it did manage to give us…
Grizzly Bomb 