ABSTRACT
In 2012, Warner Bros. publicised the release of The Dark Knight Rises – the final blockbuster installment in Christopher Nolan’s iconic Batman trilogy – with an online campaign that was designed to promote the film far and wide. New websites were created where audiences could ‘Go inside Gotham City’, as it was billed, and read editions of the Gotham Observer – a faux newspaper taken from the fictional story world that published news reports about key story events leading up to those in the film. These websites exemplify transmedia storytelling, a term coined in 2003 by Henry Jenkins to label the spread of entertainment across multiple media. Transmedia story telling, as Jenkins defines it, is the telling of ‘stories that unfold across multiple platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the [story] world’ (Jenkins, 2006: 336).
