Some official marketing for The Dark Knight Rises was supposed to hit at noon CST at Warner’s Operation Early Bird website, but apparently the big surprise was the site crashing. Never underestimate our fanatical F5 mashing for all things Batman, Hollywood. So after we kvetched about it on Twitter for twenty solid minutes and counting — the #OperationEarlyBird is the word — they fixed the server issue and showed us this map which appears to just show the locations where the six-minute IMAX prologue is going to screen in theaters next week, something we already knew. At least it appears you can get free tickets to the screening assuming the site doesn’t crash on you.
I even tried entering coordinates from the audio file at thedarkknightrises and nothing of note happened. Meh. At least we have some spoilers for that IMAX prologue:
Last night several bloggers and journalists who don’t live in the frozen tundra hell that is Iowa were invited to a six-minute IMAX prologue to The Dark Knight Rises, and I’m totally not bitter about missing it. At the post-screening reception, Chris Nolan told /film he has fifty minutes of IMAX footage (which is double the amount that was in The Dark Knight and more than double the amount in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol). Nolan has referred to IMAX as “far and away the best image format ever created”. Nolan also stated he’d shoot an entire film in IMAX if there were a camera quiet enough for dialogue scenes. Those cameras are quite noisy. Me standing outside the set shirtless and waving a big foam #1 hand while shouting “Wooooo” into a megaphone probably didn’t help either.
The IMAX prologue is playing next week before screenings of Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol at select theaters nowhere near my fancy bloggin’ trailer. The prologue included the first scene from the film and some vignettes of other scenes. If you want the opening scene spoiled for you, read this block quote:
The prologue involves Bane on a plane. In particular, there’s a trio of masked hostages that some apparent terrorists are trading to the CIA for cash. The CIA guys start interrogating the three captives, trying to pressure them into giving up Bane’s location, and it’s clear that Bane is a big fish to these guys. And then — surprise! — one of the hostages turns out to be Bane himself, who’s almost impossible to understand due to his Darth Vader-y breathing apparatus and weird accent. The CIA guy asks Bane if it was his plan to get caught — and Bane responds that it was his plan to crash this plane. Which he does, using a bigger plane that swoops down with metal cables and a squad of commandos. [io9]
You can read about the rest of the prologue at io9. The Dark Knight Rises is set (spoiler alert) eight years after the events in The Dark Knight and is scheduled to open July 20, 2012. Here’s the totally official poster: