The Batman‘s marketing campaign is in full gear, with trailers and TV spots promising a truly epic debut for Robert Pattinson’s Dark Knight. With release coming in just over a month, Warner Bros. has turned up the heat by asking fans to test their smarts against The Riddler.
The villain’s cryptogram can be seen at the end of the ‘Bat and the Cat’ trailer, though doesn’t take a Bat-computer to crack. The simple substitution cipher was solved practically instantly and translates to “you are the winged rat.”
Warner Bros has continued to drop these riddles via social media, with their latest featuring Zoë Kravitz’s Catwoman. Check it out:
Single out the capitalized first letters and you get RATAALADA (i.e. “winged rat”). Searching for this will take you to rataalada.com where you can ‘play a game’ with the Riddler. Succeed and you can unlock some sketches of Batman, with further updates promised over the next month.
With the movie set to introduce us to a new Gotham-centric cinematic universe in which new TV shows and movies will be set, this kind of background information could prove crucial to figuring out the dark secrets buried in the city’s past.
Where all these riddles are headed is anyone’s guess, though Paul Dano seems set to deliver the most terrifying version of the villain ever seen. However, it’s curious they’ve kept his face under wraps in all the trailers and production shots.
I suspect there’s more to this character than meets the eye, and fans are already theorizing that Dano’s Riddler may be the black sheep of the Wayne family, perhaps cast out for threatening to expose the skeletons in the Wayne Family closet.
We’ll find out soon, as The Batman hits theaters on March 4.
