14 DAY TRIAL // If you thought that the viral campaign for “The Dark Knight,” the second “Batman” film from Chris Nolan, was cool, you haven’t seen the best yet. With more than a year to go until “Dark Knight Rises” arrives in theaters, three brand new viral videos, apparently from Warner Bros., have emerged online.
Uploaded on YouTube by a user named “The Fire Rises,” the videos are made of dark, grainy shots of what looks like an Arkham siege: there’s booming chanting, fires and explosions, and gloomy hints that something big and dangerous is coming the way of our favorite caped superhero.
You can see all three videos below, embedded at the end of the article.
The first clip, called “419” shows footage of a burning skyscraper and other images of mayhem and devastation.
The second video is longer and perhaps more telling of what the plot of “The Dark Knight Rises” may look like, Entertainment Weekly believes.
“The second, titled ‘Outbreak,’ takes you inside of an Abu Ghraib-esque prison (Arkham Asylum?), while terrifying chanting builds in the background,” EW argues.
“In the classic comic book storyline ‘Knightfall,’ Bane did indeed stage an Arkham Asylum breakout. And it certainly feels like a full-scale Gotham City implosion would end the Dark Knight trilogy with a bang,” the publication says.
The third video, which is also the shortest, also makes for the strongest argument that this is, indeed, the beginning of the viral campaign for the film.
Called “GCN” (Gotham City News), it shows overlapping footage of an outbreak at Akrham Asylum, precisely the place where all the villains Batman captures end up – and Bane implicitly.
There’s also a clear shot of prisoners in orange prison uniforms, with their faces covered with black masks, being led out of prison. The next shot cuts to a speeding car on a bridge.
Moreover, a URL flashes at the end of the “GCN” video: it leads to a Facebook page also belonging to the same user, “The Fire Rises,” which includes, among others, an unofficial-looking poster of Nixon, the politician who will be played in the film by Matthew Modine.
Several media outlets have contacted Warner Bros. for comment, but all they could get from the movie studio was that it had no comment “at this time.”
Useless to point out, this has given fans hope that, indeed, these videos are from the upcoming “Batman” film. If not, they’re just an elaborate and very fancy-looking hoax. Check them out below.
419
Outbreak
GCN