Corona | Coming Attractions

With next week's release of a six-minute preview of The Dark Knight Rises arriving in select IMAX theaters, someone working for Warner Bros.' marketing department must have asked, "Shouldn't we release a new poster for that Batman movie we've got?"

Unlike the first teaser poster for the movie which showed a crumbling skyline of Gotham City shaped in the Bat-symbol, this second teaser poster for The Dark Knight Rises shows a menacing Bane walking away from a busted Bat mask. And with a tagline like "The Legend Ends", that all but tells me that sometime during TDKR we'll see Bane seriously injure Batman.

In the Batman comic books, Bane broke the back of Batman. The movie may follow that storyline. Perhaps it might reduce the severity of Batman's injury but what we may be seeing in the early marketing of Dark Knight Rises is a Batman villain that removes Batman as protector of Gotham City, at least for some measure of the movie.

From a pure marketing perspective, raising interest in Bane is needed. Unlike The Dark Knight's main adversary, The Joker, most mainstream audience members don't know who Bane is. The early marketing for The Dark Knight only needed to show The Joker standing in a city street. With Bane, WB's marketing dep't needs to ramp up the audience's interest in who this bad guy is, and why he's more scary than The Joker.

And in seriously nerdy movie trivia, The Dark Knight Rises will mark the second time that we've seen a snowy Gotham City (after Tim Burton's second Bat-movie, Batman Returns.)