May 23, 2011 
Warner Brothers has released the first image of Tom Hardy as Bane from Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Dark Knight Rises.
Slashfilm broke down the viral campaign, which began on the film’s official website and had many scratching their heads. What began as a blank site with an audio loop of chanting slowly revealed an image pixel by pixel. The reason the image was revealed? A fan discovered the Twitter hashtag #thefirerises in the visual spectrum of the audio file … we love you technology.
The more people tweeted the hashtag the more the image was revealed. But wait, there’s more. Each pixel revealed in the promo image is the twitter profile of the person that tweeted the hashtag – welcome to the modern age of film publicity!
Hardy has stacked on 30 pounds of muscle to play Batman’s nemesis and the image suggests he’s going to be one buff villain!
I was one of those who tweeted it. Looks like Toma Hardy did fairly well in the
new batman movie, I am very excited to see the final product 😀 I was rooting for the bad guys in this movie.