By: Scott Johnson on July 17, 2011
With the San Diego Comic-Con right around the corner, comic book movie news is coming fast and furious. In particular, The Dark Knight Rises seems to be raising quite a stir. In the irony of all ironies, The Dark Knight Rises trailer has gone viral, and Warner Bros. has done their best to stop it.
The Dark Knight Rises is a film that plays to the social media world, as one of the first marketing pushes was done via twitter. Fans were able to reveal the first image of Bane by tweeting the hashtag #thefirerises. The first official poster for The Dark Knight Rises was simply uploaded to the official website, and then spread like wildfire via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
One would think that Warner Bros. would be thrilled that fans have been sharing links to The Dark Knight Rises trailer like crazy via social networks. The only problem is that Warner Bros. hasn’t officially released The Dark Knight Rises trailer online. Instead, Warner Bros. seems to have intended for the initial release of the trailer to be an exclusive treat for Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2 movie fans.
As the way of the social world, bootleg copies of the trailer have surfaced and been posted online. To protect the trailer for the Harry Potter movie, Warner Bros. has requested the removal of the trailer from YouTube and various other sites where it was posted. Warner Bros. is in the unique position of having to try to stop the viral promotion of a movie they are trying to promote virally.
With all the bootleg trailers disappearing and fake trailers everywhere, Comic Book Bin even suggested a possible conspiracy theory over who might be behind some of those fake trailers.
In addition to the trailer, various conspiracy theories have arisen around the officially released movie poster. We posted about the possibility of a Superman logo hidden in The Dark Knight Rises poster. Others have posted about seeing (or not seeing) everything from the Joker’s face to Catwoman to a flying unicorn.
Whether there are really any hidden images at all in The Dark Knight Rises poster is still a subject of heated debate. While most movies would never encounter such fanfare, conspiracy theories, and scrutiny, analyzing every little detail of a Batman movie is part of the fun. Considering The Dark Knight Rises is still close to a year away from release, expect things to only get wilder from here. Word is that the trailer will be officially released online on Monday, and who knows what other treats Warner Bros. might have planned for Comic-Con week.
