is it just me

[riddler]

anyone remember the cereals they did for the burton movies? for '89 it was like cap'n crunch shaped like bats and i think the returns was this chocolate cereal with marshmallows. yummy! and the returns cereal came with like these motion card like things. i had all three

sadly it backfired when the McDonalds cancellation of the happy meal promo started the revolution against Burton.

seemed that the promos around the dark knight were general batman promotions as opposed to tie ins; i distinctly remember seeing the generic joker face and batman cartoon/comic style rather than the likeliness from the films. now to be fair i'm not sure what the legalities would have been with Ledgers death.

[The Laughing Fish]

I remember there being quite a bit of merchandising for The Dark Knight. There were action figures and toys in stores, including plastic gauntlets that fired fin guards like in the movie. There were also several picture books aimed at young readers and a Burger King tie-in campaign. This resulted in some parental backlash against the film being marketed towards kids. Once the movie became a critical hit, Warner Bros started promoting it as a prestige film rather than a summer blockbuster.

They did this with The Dark Knight Rises too. I remember being quite disappointed last summer by the lack of  merchandising. I suspect WB was consciously marketing it as a serious prestige film in the hopes it would win loads of awards like Return of the King did in 2003/4. But it obviously backfired on them, because TDKR didn't get a single Academy Award nomination. Heck, even Batman Forever got 3. So WB really shot themselves in the foot with that one. They could have made millions in merchandising if they hadn't been so pretentious.

WB seemed like they've learned their lesson, so far I've seen more children's merchandise for Man of Steel than I did for Dark Knight Rises. It makes me wonder if they've learned their lessons about campaigning for Oscar nominations for a comic book movie though? 

[Wayne49]

There were tons of toys for the Dark Knight series. My God. I still see them on shelves to this very day at TRU stores everywhere. I think the Dark Knight movies were every bit as merchandised as of the others. But to the original series credit, those were more fun to look at. As much as I love the Nolan films, the merchandise was horrid with the exception of the Hot Toys lines.