THE DARK KNIGHT RISES 11
international scavenger hunt and picture release of Bane created an environment where fans of the film could share their emotions with others who feel the same way. As a result of the intense social media campaign, the movie surpassed the global success of its predecessor, The Dark Knight( Box Office Mojo, 2013).
At 12:00am on July 20, 2012, a man had entered a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado dressed as one of the villains from the film, as were many others in the theatre, but he was armed with automatic weapons and shot over fifty people watching the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises. As a result, the film faced an international crisis communication challenge because the event was arguably escalated when people took to Twitter to share their opinions of the event. Regardless of tweets that contained information about the shooting, it severely affected the attendance of the movie. However, on top of the large, faithful Batman-lovers community, people were still excited to see the movie. This may be because the shooting actually increased the press coverage for the film or perhaps because thrillseekers wanted to experience the newly escalated sense of fear associated with film.
The strong community that Warner Brothers created through a gradual release of a sequence of international events via Twitter utilized the drip-drip-drip technique to encourage fans to participate so that information could be released. For example, fans needed to tweet messages with the hashtag # thefirerises to unlock pixels of an image of Bane and the scavenger hunt required fans to explore a particular area, assumably geographically close to their home, in order to release the third and most popular trailer for the film. Senses of excitement derived by fans from the campaign ‟ s criminal case investigations are model examples of uses and gratifications theory at work. The campaign produced the material so that fans could“ use” it and feel a sense of accomplishment after the goal was achieved. Similar to the excitement from the campaign leading up to the film ‟ s release, the actual film is naturally exciting and full of quick, action-filled and abrupt scenes. The violent and dark themes can easily be associated with the action genre of the film but also with a frightening and on-edge feeling for the viewers. The movie was used by fans to fulfill their love for Batman and action films, or for catwoman.
Community and a strong fan base contributed to the success of the film through continuous use of Twitter to communicate feelings and opinions on events throughout the campaign. Twitter is particularly linked to the financial success of the film because the excitement and fear generated from tweets are accessible to the public and displayed loyalty to the film even in the midst of the Aurora crisis. The fans ultimately proved that a successful marketing campaign can manage existing communities in order to influence positive opinions of a product in people beyond the limits of the community.
Further Research and Future Directions
Prior to beginning this case study, we read that many sources applauded Warner Brother ingenious marketing campaign for the film and we wanted to investigate what they did right. Due to the limited scope of time, it was difficult to research all the campaign ‟ s components. Therefore, we decided to focus on three hashtags and establish thematic categories for contents of the messages. For future studies, we would consider investigating the campaign in more depth. This would include focusing on other social media websites, such as Facebook, Tumblr, and YouTube. However, social media marketing is only one component of the campaign. Traditional media like television, radio and billboards should also be analyzed because they are also likely to have contributed to the awareness of the film and ultimately its financial success.