One of the most memorable aspects of The Dark Knight, aside from being a really freaking great movie, was its innovative viral marketing campaign. Using crowdsourcing to release early images of characters, trailers and eventually give away early premiere tickets via a series of websites, it was an absolutely exciting time to be a fan (here’s a great wiki on it, if you missed it).

With the news this week that the third and final Nolan Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, has started filming, you had to figure that the new marketing campaign would be starting…eventually, right?

Well, to the shock and awe of many, including myself, it started TODAY.

If you go to the Dark Knight Rises website, you get a looping audio clip of a chant, over a black page.  Clicking on the page allows you to download the audio file.

A rather intrepid fan used an audio program to view the spectrum of the file.  As seen in the below screenshot  - it says, repeatedly #TheFireRises.  Pretty clearly a Twitter hashtag.

[caption id=“attachment_5140” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“I love when other nerds figure this stuff out for me…"][/caption]

But it’s ALSO a Twitter account! Looks like each time someone tweets the hash tag, part of an image is opened at http://www.thedarkknightrises.com/image.html

However, someone already pulled apart the flash file, and look at what we’ve got…

[caption id=“attachment_5139” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Click for High-Rez!"][/caption]

That right there? TOM HARDY AS BANE, LOOKING AWESOME AS HELL.

GOD DAMN I LOVE MARKETING LIKE THIS. BRING ON MORE! NOWWWW!

The Dark Knight Rises hits theaters on July 20th, 2012.