The Dark Knight remains the gold standard for online viral marketing for a movie, a series of hints and games dropped over the course of months that had seemingly the entire Internet at a fever pitch by the time the movie opened in summer of 2008. And even though the third Christopher Nolan Batman film The Dark Knight Rises has only begun production, the very sly viral campaign has already begun. We got our first look at Tom Hardy as Bane only after some devoted Bat-fans decoded some hints at the film's official site. Now the same YouTube user, The Fire Rises, who uploaded the Bane photo has put three videos online that seem to indicate there's trouble at Gotham's famed Arkham Asylum. Check out the three below.
The chanting you hear in the latter two, which I can't decipher for the life of me, can also be heard at the official viral site, which points to the videos being legit parts of the Warner Bros. marketing campaign. Of course, with all this viral stuff being so deliberately under the radar it's hard to ever know for sure what's real, but we're going to operate under that assumption for now. So what does it all mean, beyond the widely-speculated plot point that a breakout from Arkham Asylum kicks off the action in the new film? That's for you all to discuss with the rest of us in the comments.
