Chapter 860: Opening with Nobodies

As the trailer began to play, the noisy hall instantly fell silent. Everyone stared intently at the alloy screen at the front of the room, terrified of missing a single shot.

As the entertainment editor for the Los Angeles Times, Sarah naturally sat in the very front row of the press section. Arms crossed, she watched the highly mysterious trailer with utmost focus.

The trailer opened with the Warner Company logo set against a gloomy Dark Knight background. Next, the screen revealed Batman's iconic Gotham architecture and cityscape, and a subtitle appeared: Every hero has a journey.

Bruce Wayne then appeared, walking through a village as if tracking down the main villain's whereabouts.

The subtitles continued: Every hero has an end.

The voice of the Ninja Master, leader of the villainous Ninja Group from the first film, then sounded off-screen:

"If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, then you become something else entirely. You become a legend, Mr. Wayne, a legend!"

The camera cut to a hospital bed. Sergeant Jim Gordon, played by Gary Oldman, lay there looking injured. His expression and voice were filled with agony as he spoke to the person opposite him.

"We were in this together, and then you were gone... but now this evil rises. The Batman... has to come back."

Gordon's voice was strained and agonized.

The person opposite him, who had yet to appear on camera, answered.

"What if he doesn't exist anymore?"

Was this an echo of the second film's ending?

Sarah propped up her chin. At the end of The Dark Knight, Batman became a departed warrior, a hidden hero. However, the actors, cinematographer, and screenwriters had previously hinted in interviews that Duke's Batman Trilogy was a complete series, and that the third installment's conclusion and callbacks to the previous two would be an indispensable focus.

The previous dialogue had no narrative connection, giving it profound undertones. Next came quick cuts that revealed brief flashes of information: Batman's motorcycle, Gordon destroying the Bat-Signal, and an ultra-fast jump cut showing the face of this installment's primary villain, "Destroyer Bane."

Then, the camera returned to a shot from the previously released poster: crumbling high-rises, a ruined industrial city, and the bright silhouette of Batman. The camera gradually zoomed in on the silhouette, revealing the film's title in a flash of white.

After finishing the trailer, Sarah thought back to the original Batman Begins. That film's poster also featured a massive bat looming over Gotham, but it used an orange background and a flat design. In the poster for the finale, however, Batman faced an apocalyptic, collapsing Gotham.

Every hero has a journey and a beginning: why do we fall? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up. Every hero also has an end: it doesn't matter who you are, what matters is what you do.

This was not the end. Rather, it was the start of the promotional explosion for The Dark Knight Rises.

With half a month left before the film's release, Warner Company brought out a grand finale—an extended thirteen-minute behind-the-scenes featurette. For fans eager to understand every aspect of the film's production, this video was the ultimate feast to satisfy their appetites.

In the featurette, Duke appeared alongside the creative team and the entire lead cast. They detailed everything from the origin of the story to stunt filming, set construction, visual effects, and the shooting of massive scenes. It also included a large amount of never-before-seen behind-the-scenes footage and working photos.

Furthermore, fans could visit the official website for The Dark Knight Rises to download a forty-nine-page official production booklet containing cast and crew interviews, revised scripts, film design blueprints, and more.

In addition, The Dark Knight Rises held its first round of media screenings in North America. The film received unanimous praise from the press in attendance, and Warner Brothers announced that it would debut in ninety-seven overseas markets simultaneously with North America on the first weekend of May.

Of course, The Dark Knight Rises couldn't win everyone's favor. Some critics blasted the film as nothing more than a dumb, idiotic product of the Hollywood industrial assembly line.

Duke never denied this point. Almost every film he had made since entering the industry was an assembly line product. Besides, let alone these massive commercial productions, weren't the Best Picture Oscar winners and even The Shawshank Redemption—films praised to the high heavens by niche audiences—also born of the Hollywood industrial assembly line?

Warner Brothers spared no effort in promoting The Dark Knight Rises. In fact, starting many years ago, the major Hollywood studios had developed a blockbuster mentality: giving B-movies A-list treatment, heavily promoting them, granting them wide releases, and raking in massive profits.

With the summer season about to begin, another summer movie season was arriving. Along with it came the complaints of artsy audiences whining about too many sequels, superheroes, and special effects. They would complain endlessly about these films while simultaneously lining up to buy tickets.

In their mouths, all commercial films were mindless.

When laying blame for the long summer movie season, these people were always unanimous in identifying the scapegoats: Steven Spielberg's Jaws and George Lucas's Star Wars, released two years later.

Jaws wasn't the first film to receive a wide release across North America either.

In 1971, Billy Jack opened in 1,200 theaters, far exceeding the 465 for Jaws.

Star Wars only opened in 43 theaters. In today's terms, it was the "massive upset" hit of 1977. However, these two films were indeed the first to break the $100 million box-office mark. They pioneered the concept of "moviegoing as a thrill ride," drawing people back for repeat viewings—something The Godfather could never hope to match.

Regardless of what those who hated commercial films said, the success of Jaws and Star Wars was undeniable. The influence of the latter instantly crushed all Best Picture Oscar winners; even its name had been used by one nation as a strategy to fool another.

After so many years of development, summer season films naturally evolved distinct patterns.

For instance, sheer size mattered nowadays.

In Jurassic World, which Duke had seen in the past, the T-Rex yielded to the larger and stronger Indominus Rex. As a character in the film put it, "No one is impressed by a dinosaur anymore."

The first Jurassic Park was entirely different. The breakout stars weren't the T-Rex, but the much smaller Velociraptors—smart, fast, and highly lethal.

The first generation of blockbusters consisted of stories like David and Goliath, pitting speed and cunning against sheer size, with speed and cunning coming out on top.

Spielberg cast physical underdogs for Jaws, while Star Wars could be called a hymn to the little guy.

Just like Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, there was a stark difference between the commercial masterpieces of the eighties and nineties and those made after the new millennium. You could say that the old commercial blockbusters were as distinctly American as apple pie.

When Jurassic Park hit theaters in France in 1993, the French Minister of Culture declared it "a threat to the French national identity." He stated that every French citizen had a "patriotic duty" to boycott the film and watch the French historical drama Germinal instead.

But one year later, Hollywood's overseas profits surpassed its domestic profits.

Nowadays, more than half of the profits for films like Michael Bay's Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen and Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon came from overseas.

According to the data Duke had obtained, China, the fastest-growing film market in the world, was expected to overtake North America by 2020. Hollywood was adjusting and promoting its production schedules accordingly.

The Chinese officials in the script for Iron Man 3 were less malicious; product placements for Chinese banks and other brands appeared in the Transformers series; and the monsters in Godzilla and Pacific Rim ravaged major cities along the Pacific coast. Why was this? Because about ten new movie theaters were opening in China every single day.

Hollywood's business strategies were constantly changing. If you couldn't grasp them in time, you would stumble.

For example, David Ellison had always believed blockbusters were for boys, failing to notice the market shifts in recent years, which directly led to Fast and Furious 5 lacking staying power at the box office.

In the past, Hollywood had a specific term to describe its core consumers: diehard fans (fanboys). From this name alone, one could see which gender dominated this group.

These were the sci-fi geeks who collected merchandise and alphabetized their DVDs. Pale-faced and averse to shaking hands, they supposedly marched out of homes stuffed with Nintendo consoles in droves to propel the Marvel Company's latest films to the top.

Indeed, ever since Star Wars, the major studios had targeted teenage boys. As Michael Bay once said, "I make movies for teenage boys."

But that was before Twilight. The misconception that only boys could make a blockbuster a hit had been repeatedly shattered. For films like The Hunger Games, nearly two-thirds of the audience were women.

However, did these blockbusters truly equate to mindlessness?

"Opening with nobodies, ending with everyone a superhero."

At this year's Oscars, the single-shot director whom Duke had rejected finally won Best Director with the prematurely released Birdman. In the film, he referred to comic book movies as "cultural genocide."

Whether in terms of quality or content, the film was arguably mediocre. The reviews from both audiences and professional critics were poor.

Its victory precisely reflected the Academy's deep-rooted prejudice against box-office blockbusters.

Perhaps the Oscars always mistakenly viewed themselves as the Nobel Peace Prize, looking down on blockbusters for pandering to the lowest common denominator, but how much fundamental difference was there between the products of the Hollywood assembly line?

To put it bluntly, they were all just assembly line products. The only difference was that commercial films catered to the masses, while Oscar films pandered to the niche.

Today's mindless entertainment often became tomorrow's beloved classic.

Inception was as ingenious as a cinematic watchmaker. The exhilarating filmmaking of Mad Max was in no way inferior to any film from the past. The artistry, technique, and dedication in Pixar's filmmaking lost to no Best Picture Oscar winner...