UPDATED: Warner Bros. Kicks Off Viral Campaign For “Man of Steel” With a Countdown

This is possibly the greatest news I’ve heard in a while, given that I am such a huge fan of Superman. Warner Bros. has a new website that is the homepage for the fictional Deep Space Radio Wave Project, and it appears to be viral marketing for Man of Steel. Get the details after the break.

The hard work has already been done, but let’s try to piece together how this started. The DSRW website received various signals throughout the day, and needed the “community” to decode them. Before the signals were decoded, the website showed the project’s mission statement.

Mission Statement

Welcome to the home of the DSRW Project, a private non-profit research organization with a network of world-wide interstellar communication facilities that support the exploration of our solar system and the universe. We believe our research is essential to understanding the origin of life.

Our mission is to capture deep space radio waves and analyze them for patterns and messages. We share our findings with the public and work together to answer the question, “Are we alone in the universe?” Through collaboration, we will separate real communication from galactic white noise.

Once the signals were decoded, however, we got this message:

That leads us to this link (though I am unclear on how), where we have a live countdown using the same symbols. All of these symbols are supposedly Kryptonian, though they don’t match any known version of the language ever created. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a new version of Kryptonian made specifically for this movie, as it is a reboot of the Superman mythology.

It seems pretty obvious that this is for Man of Steel. As you can see on the bottom of the websites, they are copyrighted by Warner Bros. and DC Comics, and Man of Steel is the only DC Comics film on the horizon dealing with aliens. Will this be part of a larger campaign, or was this all done just to give us a countdown? The more urgent question is, what is the countdown for and when will it end? Could we see the first full trailer finally, as is expected for this weekend? If you find any clues, let us know in the comments below. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye out.

Man of Steel retells the iconic story of the Superman. Henry Cavill plays the famed superhero and alter ego Clark Kent, and the all-star cast includes Amy Adams, Diane Lane, Kevin Costner, Russell Crowe, Laurence Fishburne, and Michael Shannon. Written by David Goyer and directed by Zack Snyder, Man of Steel flies into theaters on June 14, 2013.

Source: ComicBookMovie.com

UPDATE

As Sean notes in the comments below, the symbols stand for numbers in the order they were revealed, giving us “77587619”. If you go to 77587619.com, it redirects you to the final link n77d58w76d19.com. The countdown uses the same symbols, so we can tell it ends tomorrow (Tuesday) at NOON EST / 9AM PST (Updated). Our other commenter, Wizdum reinforces what I secretly speculated, that “n77d58w76d19” is actually a map coordinate, and it takes to north Baffin Bay, near Greenland. This sounds like either where we see Clark in the teaser trailer (working on a boat), or maybe his Fortress of Solitude. Hopefully we’ll find out in a few hours. We’ll provide an update on what happens at the end of the countdown as soon as know.