New Dark Knight poster

Warner Bros. has released a new – and fantastic – poster for The Dark Knight. Those who signed up to get text messages from The Joker were the first to be alerted to its appearance on a new section the WhySoSerious.com site titled, appropriately, It’s All Part of the Plan. That phrase you should recognize from the first trailer. Flip the switch at the top of the screen and you’ll be sent to the poster.

Before you do so you might also note something at the bottom of the page, below all the defaced presidential portraits, that just says “Four Days.” Not sure what this is referring to. It could be the release of a new trailer or it could just be another prank by the Joker that will eventually lead to that new trailer, which is reported to debut theatrically in front of next week’s Iron Man.

Back to the poster, though, this is really quite good. It not only brings Batman firmly into the picture after an online campaign that’s focused first on the Clown Prince of Crime and then on Harvey Dent but it does so in truly dramatic fashion as he stands before a building with the bat symbol as a blazing fire.

It also brings in the entire star-studded cast as everyone gets above-title billing. Since the presence of so many strong actors – not the lazy kind but real acting actors – is such a strong selling point to not only audiences but critics it’s great that they’re making sure these folks get the attention they deserve.

Finally, it continues the branding theme of this print campaign to date, which is to portray the bat symbol as something that’s been co-opted for evil purposes. If you remember, the teaser poster used it as the gruesome smile of the Joker in some graffiti on a wall. That says to me we’re going to see a lot of that in the movie itself as Batman finds himself on the defensive quite a bit.

Check out the poster below and enjoy.