Rising Dark!

With what little we know of the upcoming final installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, it doesn’t take much of a leak to get our excitement levels racing.

The casting news: Nolan, being a huge Stanley Kubrick fan, announced last week that Matthew Modine has nabbed a role. Modine, famous for his portrayal of Joker (another, less psychotic one) in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, will join Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Michael Cain, Gary Oldman, Joseph Gordon Levitt and ‘man of the hour’, Tom Hardy (Bronson, Mad Max: Fury Road) for the 2012 release.

Yes, yes, yes – this we know.

The juicy news lies in the salivating tidbits that have only just begun to surface as TDKR begins its viral marketing campaign. And oh what a campaign it’s shaping up to be and we’ve still got over a year to go. Just as Inception and The Dark Knight before it (who could forget the ‘Why So Serious‘ campaign?) – this little viral join-the-dots whiz-bangery from the folks at Batman Marketing Central ups the ante again.

Last week saw the first official photo of Tom Hardy as ‘Bane’; mask, muscles and all. As ominous as he looks – it’s how his picture was revealed that is the real genius. Head on over to the film’s official website to hear a barely audible WAV file of what can only be described as a large gathering of citizens shouting chants reminiscent of a Third Reich march. It’s truly frightening!

We listened, re-listened, played it backwards and slowed it down to death – but were still scratching heads as to how one would turn this into a new piece of ‘leaked imagery’. Read this article at memeburn, detailing the extraordinary lengths to which code-breaking geeks and all manner of Poirot meets The Hardy Boys style shenanigans (audio spectrum, hidden Twitter tags, etc) led to the initial public discovery of the Bane pic. Now THIS is an interactive film viral marketing campaign if ever we saw one. The irony that The Batman first appeared in Detective Comics isn’t lost on us either.

Bring on July 19, 2012.