Tom Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.
The final piece of the most recent Batman trilogy (before it gets rebooted again), The Dark Knight Rises, won't be out until the summer of 2012. It seems the viral campaign has just been activated, however. Yesterday the website went online with an audio file of what sounded like people chanting. According to Slate, "someone posting to the forums on SuperHeroHype had run the sound through a computer program and gotten a visual representation of the audio spectrum—which spelled out the phrase TheFireRises. People recognized that as a Twitter hashtag, which led them to discover the new Twitter account @thefirerises."
Eventually this image of Tom Hardy as Bane showed up (which was being composed by other photos submitted by fans via the Fire Rises Twitter account). What does it all mean? Oh, that we're in for a mysterious ad campaign slowly revealing itself over the course of a year (and hey, powers that be, we wouldn't mind seeing the Bat Signal on the Woolworth Building again!).
Meanwhile, the movie will be filming starting in June, right here in Gotham (as well as Pittsburgh, London, and India). If you spot Magnus Rex and Fox Hills Green locations around town, those are the names it will be filming under.
