Am I right, folks? Help me out here!

If you have been on the internet at all in the past few weeks, you might have heard something about the new Dark Knight trailer that is to premiere on Sunday. I’m kidding, of course. If you haven’t heard about this by now, then you must have been curled up in bed, cotton stuffed in your ears, going “LA LA LA LA LA.” Because it’s everywhere. It’s in my racoon wounds!

Sorry. I promise to never, ever insert a left-field Family Guy reference into an article again.

It’s just hard to find new, exciting things to say about all the Dark Knight marketing. Yes, we’re all excited for the film, but even the most hardcore of fans - the type of people who ran all over nearby cities snapping pictures of giant letters and retrieving gym bags from train station lockers - are getting fed up with the wild goose chase. No matter how many fun hijinks they put us through, it’s still Just A Movie.

The latest ARG in a long, long line of red herrings actually did pay off - for a select few. A series of scavenger hunt clues led people in major cities like Boston and Chicago to theaters that held special screenings of the new trailer; afterwards, they raffled off film reels (one per theater) of the trailer. Yes, film reels. Of the trailer. For people to take home. When news of this first surfaced, a few people were rightfully suspicious. Given that the studio was keeping the new trailer tightly under wraps until Sunday, why would they happily give away copies that could be easily digitized by someone with any sort of technical knowledge?

They didn’t, of course.

What the happy winners went home with was a “Jokerized” version of the trailer, edited by none other than the clown himself. Recut and covered with scribbles, it’s difficult to decipher what the original version was like. So far, the only versions available online are low-quality camera copies, but it will undoubtedly make its way online in glorious low definition before long.

Just to rub salt in the wound, another secret code led to a “sitting ducks” game that required users to play a tedious game and then decipher strings of binary, all in the hope that they, too, would get a sneak peek at the trailer.

Where did it all lead? To a splash page, of course. A placeholder for where the actual trailer will soon be.

If it all sounds just too depressing to deal with, pacify yourself with these recently-released posters and promotional images, compiled by Merrick of AICN. And then? Yeah, Batman Begins trivia. You knew where this was going.

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Categories: Movie stories //