Game On! The Dark Knight Rises viral campaign reveals Tom Hardy as Bane.

Four years ago around this time, I actually was one of the many who did whatever it was you had to do (I don't remember) in order to get that first reveal of Health Ledger as The Joker.  This time around, I'm letting other people do the hard labor and merely reaping the rewards after the fact.  Anyway, some kind of puzzle involving weird noises on The Dark Knight Rises website and the Twitter hashtag "#thefirerises" brought us the above photo of Tom Hardy as Bane.  Not much to say other than Hardy looks pretty huge and it's nice to see that Nolan is still keeping something vaguely resembling the comic book version.  It's a nice start to what likely will be a long and twisty viral campaign for the third Batman film.   We'll probably get a bare-bones teaser debuting in July with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II, and a full on trailer in December (attached to Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows no doubt), with a second trailer attached to The Avengers on May 4th, 2012.  So, with that said, game on.

Scott Mendelson