Is The Avengers Going to be Sabotaged by Warner Brothers?

After being eerily silent for a very long time, The Dark Knight Rises has finally started to make [...]

After being eerily silent for a very long time, The Dark Knight Rises has finally started to make news again this week, with director Christopher Nolan starting to do press and official announcements about movie tie-in toys and a novelization. There's also a report at ComicBookMovie.com that a new trailer should pop up very soon, and that the trailer itself may actually be physically at theaters already. So while Fandango says that the film is lagging behind The Avengers in the court of public opinion, that's after months of virtually no promotion. It's basically like saying that a boxer is losing a match when he hasn't yet hit back. It's not factually inaccurate, but it's likely misleading. But why start now? Creating a buzz for The Dark Knight Rises right now is a great strategy for a few reasons, only one of which is to take the wind out of the sails of The Avengers. Let's think about it for a minute... It gives Warners a long lead time Getting started on an aggressive promotional campaign now for a movie that releases in July gives the studio a long lead time to build awareness and enthusiasm. It's about the same amount of time that Marvel/Disney had for The Avengers, given that their promotional campaign for the film really kicked into high gear around the time of the Super Bowl spot. A longer lead time also means you can start small, with a viral campaign and a single trailer or two, before going into the full-court press of promoting your studio's biggest summer blockbuster. It can use The Avengers as a support system The last few years, there have been so many superhero films--and usually only one or two a year about which people were genuinely interested--that a lot of mainstream movie critics have complained that there were just too many and none of them seemed necessary. This year, things are different; The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spider-Man have all got tremendous interest behind them and all look good. It's likely that all three will be bona fide hits. [That also happened last year, with Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger and X-Men: First Class--but this year it would be without a Jonah Hex or Green Lantern to pull down the score. That is, unless you count Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, but it seems like people have already forgotten about that movie.] At any rate, making The Dark Knight Rises visible to fans who are reaching the peak of their pre-Avengers hysteria will be a great way to get people thinking, talking and excited about the next major superhero film of the summer--and sorry, kids, The Amazing Spider-Man hardly counts as "major." It undercuts The Avengers And, yes, it can't hurt that it undercuts the promotional campaign for The Avengers just a little to begin shifting the focus back to the Bat. They're still the presumptive #1 and #2 films at this summer's box office and they're still being produced by competing studios with competing agendas. If The Avengers performs better than expectations, it could be a major victory for Disney after the pounding they took on John Carter. If it underperforms, even as a major success, then the whole year could be seen as a black eye for the studio and some people could be looking for work. It seems petty, but it could be true--and if it is, it probably won't work exactly the way it's intended, as The Avengers is getting fantastic word-of-mouth and seems pretty bulletproof right now. But if people start talking about this as the summer of The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, it could perceivably lower interest in The Amazing Spider-Man, sandwiched awkwardly between the two.

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