One year ago, some very lucky peo­ple had the oppor­tu­nity to watch the first clips of The Dark Knight at Wiz­ard World 07. It took 12 months, but now that footage is avail­able on youTube for all to see, enjoy:

Thanks Alas­tor!

This Swedish pre­view for The Dark Knight con­tains some new Joker footage we haven’t yet seen. Some fore­warn­ing, the voiceover is in Swedish but I think we get the gist, any­way, most of you are flu­ent in Swedish — right?

Thanks Alas­tor and Csam!

A new mes­sage was posted to the mains and pub­lic forums of Cit­i­zens for Bat­man today,

Poster: BriDog72 — Thurs­day, July 3rd, 2008 at 00:12
Seems there’s been a bit of a slipup with the project me and Batfan73 have been work­ing on. BatFan’s in jail and I need everyone’s help. He left me a voice­mail, it was kinda gar­bled, but he said he was picked up by the cops for tres­pass­ing, so he needs some help get­ting every­thing acti­vated. He’s not sure when he’s going to be able to extract him­self from his sit­u­a­tion.
He said he needs some­one to get some sort of key off of an invoice, num­ber 38272899 (geez, I hope I copied that down right), but he got cut off before he could tell me what this invoice is or even where to find it. We need this key to acti­vate every­thing.
Can any­one fig­ure this out? We’re going to need to fix this or the whole thing’s ruined! Anyone?

In an email to Glenn Barhyte, Jim Gor­don made ref­er­ence to Maroni Imports, lead­ing us to a new viral site, www​.maroni​im​ports​.com

With the invoice num­ber from the forums post and the sruname “Cras­ton”, which appeared in a small news update to the Gotham City Rail website:

ALERT: The STCS will undergo ini­tial fine-tuning of its soft­ware on the evening of July 8th. This rou­tine main­te­nance may result in tem­po­rary inter­mit­tent sys­tem delays. We apol­o­gize for any incon­ve­nience this may cause. — C. Cras­ton, Sr. Elec. Engi­neer, GCR

With this infor­ma­tion the afore­men­tioned invoice can be down­loaded, at the bot­tom of it there is a key for a sig­nal booster, Key: 5D45C08AA6C3638D7829C0D5183FDB14B0CDBF1DCB12. With this key, the sig­nal booster was acti­vated and CFB was updated to show two sets of co-ordinates in New York and Chicago. Hence the two loca­tions for the big event this July 8th are now known:

New York and Chicago

CFB has since been updated to include a new mis­sion statement:

Some­times, you have to take a stand. You have to fight for respect. You have to let the entire world know you’re here.
On July 8th, nobody will be able to ignore us. Gather at the above coor­di­nates at the appointed time, and help us take a stand in sup­port of Bat­man!
If you can’t join us on the ground, we’ll be pro­vid­ing a way for you to watch what goes down, live on this web­site.
Defend Gotham! Defend Bat­man!
Key: 5D45C08AA6C3638D7829C0D5183FDB14B0CDBF1DCB12
Sig­nal Booster sta­tus: ON

Thanks Pierre!

Read the rest of this entry »

As there is cur­rently no major viral mar­ket­ing tak­ing place, it seems the right time to fill you in on all the smaller Dark Knight sto­ries that have been float­ing about.

Advance Book­ings

The Dark Knight, with the same amount of times to release as Spider-man 3, has sold over eight times as many tick­ets, with a major­ity of those being at IMAX the­aters, report Movi​et​ick​ets​.com via Film School Rejects. To put that into per­spec­tive — Spider-man 3, which was eight times behind, opened to a $150 mil­lion week­end with the record for largest open­ing week­end ever. This also comes from Fan­dango:

With less than three weeks remain­ing till “The Dark Knight” opens on July 18, at 12:01 a.m., Fan­dango, the nation’s lead­ing movie­goer des­ti­na­tion, is find­ing that dozens of show­times for the film are already sold out. (Buy Tick­ets)

Bat­pod and Tum­bler on Tour

The Bat pod and the tum­bler are doing the rounds, tour­ing a num­ber of cities before the movies’ pre­mière. Head­ing to:

• Phoenix
• Den­ver
• St. Louis
• Cleve­land (July 6)
• Kansas City
• Cincin­nati (July 5)
• Wash­ing­ton, DC
• Philadel­phia
• Boston
• Toronto
• Nia­gara Falls, NY
• New York City
• Chicago

July 5 the dis­play will be at Kings Island in Cincin­nati, Ohio from 12:00om to 2:00pm and then be trans­ported to the Show­case Cin­ema de Lux & IMAX in Spring­dale, Ohio and be on dis­play from 3:30pm to 5:30pm that afternoon.

For Cleve­landers, the good will be on dis­play at the Cin­e­mark Val­ley View on Sun­day July 6 from 8:00am to 5:00pm.

Kevin Smith Reviews TDK

On his blog, Kevin Smith posted a short review after the lucky man caught a pre­view screening:

With­out giv­ing any­thing away, this is an epic film (and trust me: based on the sheer size and scope of the visu­als and sto­ry­telling, that’s not an over­state­ment). It’s the “God­fa­ther II” of comic book films and three times more earnest than “Bat­man Begins” (and fuck, was that an earnest film). Eas­ily the most adult comic book film ever made. Heath Ledger didn’t so much give a per­for­mance as he dis­ap­peared com­pletely into the role; I know I’m not the first to sug­gest this, but he’ll likely get at least an Oscar nod (if not the win) for Best Sup­port­ing Actor. Fuck­ing flick’s nearly three hours long and only leaves you want­ing more (in a great way). I can’t imag­ine any­one being dis­ap­pointed by it. Nolan and crew have cre­ated some­thing close to a masterpiece.

On Set

SHH were lucky enough to visit The Dark Knight’s set dur­ing film­ing, with a chance to spend time with the cast for an interview:

Writer/Director Christo­pher Nolan
Chris­t­ian Bale — Bruce Wayne/Batman
Aaron Eck­hart — Har­vey Dent/Two-Face
Crow­ley, Hen­ning & Old­man — Pro­duc­tion Designer, Cos­tume Designer and Com­mis­sioner Gordon

Give­aways

IESB Give­away
Film School Rejects Giveaway

(If I had some swag I’d give it away too, hint hint)

No Robin in Bat­man 3

Chris­t­ian Bale has ruled out an appear­ance of Robin in the next and any sub­se­quent sequals of The Dark Knight, put simply:

If Robin crops up in one of the new Bat­man films, I’ll be chain­ing myself up some­where and refus­ing to go to work.

Gotham Knight (July 8th release)

Fea­ture from Wiz­ard World 08

TV Spe­cials

HBO will air a first look of The Dark Knight on July 10th, 2008 at 10:45pm east­ern. The His­tory chan­nel will also be run­ning a pro­gram look­ing at the his­tory of Bat­man on July 16th in an hour long spe­cial. Thanks Victor!

Heath Ledger Designed his own Makeup

Or so Screen Rant tell us (thanks Tiffany):

“he [Heath] showed up with a very basic make-up kit con­sist­ing of store bought mas­cara, white grease paint and lip­stick and and basi­cally designed the make-up there on the spot”

The clues from the lat­est Why So Seri­ous viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign have led us to the stu­pid bats page con­tain­ing a brand new Dark Knight poster made up of Joker cards and scratched Joker ramblings:

The prize for the Oper­a­tor puz­zle was a new arcade game, “Punk Drop”:

whysose​ri​ous​.com/​p​u​n​k​d​r​op/

The aim is to knock down the “punks”. If you hit a dummy, a light appears next to another one, if you hit that one the light moves to the next dummy, and so on. If you com­plete three lit dummy hits in a row a ticket comes out of the machine, link­ing to a new “Stu­pid Bats” page:

whysose​ri​ous​.com/​s​t​u​p​i​d​b​a​ts/

A new Viral chal­lenge has been unveiled at whysose​ri​ous​.com/​o​p​e​r​a​t​or/ through a new text from the Joker:

Wake up, clown! You have *one hour* to reply to be a part of today’s fun. /operator

Fol­low­ing a reply, this was sent:

Good. Do not reply again. I’ll be in touch…

After the hour dead­line, par­tic­i­pants were sent code words:

Work together, clowns. Your code-word: XXXXXXXX. Your part­ner: XXX-XXX-XXXX. Do NOT call until told to. Do not pub­li­cize this number.

Wait for a call — you will receive one or more code words. Relay these words to your partner.

You’re the first in the chain. Call your part­ner and relay your code-word NOW.

When all “relays” were com­pleted, all five chains had dropped and five words are shown, these all have the word “house” in com­mon, enter­ing that into the box reveals a new game, “Punk Drop”.

Thanks Pierre!

Why So Seri­ous have updated their front page for the first time in what seems an age — it now cov­ers the entire Viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign com­plete with Joker check­list on tasks, a list of Gotham city web pages and assorted items that can all be clicked for part of the viral adven­ture. For exam­ple, bowl­ing shoes, a per­son­al­ity quiz, the trailer clip­pings, let­ters from a ran­som note, etc.

Three future tasks have yet to be ticked off:

12. Be good to my guests
13. Gather all my fans
14. Leave a big mark

Reports

Some of the viral links on WSS con­tain reports on the viral event, with date, a list of occur­rences, the end result, pic­tures and the after­math — pro­vid­ing a suc­cinct review of how we’ve got this far:

Cit­i­zens for Batman

Where a page orig­i­nally stood we now find a count­down, head­ing omi­nously towards July 8th. CFB have also been send­ing out their pro­pa­ganda to lucky Gotham citizens,

Includ­ing the letter:

Cit­i­zens for Batman!

It’s time to go pub­lic. To really defend Bat­man, we have to show the world how big our move­ment is. So check out the good­ies inside and show your pride in CFB!

And get ready for a MAJOR show of force July 8th. (check out cit​i​zens​for​bat​man​.org for the latest.

Defend Gotham. Defend Batman!

Brian Dou­glass
Founder, Cit­i­zens for Bat­man

Thanks Dioz, Csam and Pierre!