The Wish Heard Around The World’

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If you were on any kind of social media on November 15, 2013, chances are you found yourself swept up in the coverage of an unusual event happening in San Francisco.

On that day, thousands of people came together to rally around one little boy.

Miles Scott was five years old and battling cancer. His wish was to be a superhero. And on that day, he was.

When the call went out that the Make-A-Wish foundation was putting together a special day for Miles, in which he would evolve into Batkid, city officials, law enforcement, local businesses and volunteers jumped in to help. But what no one was expecting was the thousands of regular people who showed up to be part of the day.

After turning San Francisco into Gotham City — the fictional home of Batman — Miles, dressed as Batkid, took part in staged events that found him disabling a (plastic) bomb, thwarting the Riddler from robbing a bank, and chasing The Penguin throughout San Francisco in the Batmobile, ultimately catching him and freeing his hostage.

The event culminated with the Mayor of Gotham — actual San Francisco mayor at the time, Ed Lee — presenting Miles with a key to the city.

The San Francisco paper of record, the Chronicle, even got in on the action, producing a Gotham City Chronicle edition to honor Miles’ efforts with a massive headline proclaiming, “Batkid Saves City: Hooded hero nabs Riddler, rescues damsel in distress.”

Organized by the Make-A-Wish Foundation’s San Francisco Greater Bay Area chapter, the event was aided throughout by a social media plan created by a marketing agency.

The chapter also sent out an email a month prior to the event asking for supporters, initially hoping for just s few hundred people to be a part of the closing ceremony.

Those requests took on a life of their own and by the day of the event, estimates are that approximately 10,000–12,000 people jammed various venues to cheer on Batkid.

As for social media that day, it’s believed that over 400,000 tweets were posted, using either #batkid or #SFBatkid as the hashtag. Mashable also announced that Batkid was discussed in a total of 117 countries, and the news reached somewhere between 750 million and 1.7 billion people worldwide, according to a social-media agency.

During and after the event, public interest brought so much traffic to the Make-A-Wish Foundation’s website that it crashed for a bit. Once back online, donations increased greatly in the weeks following Batkid’s day of adventure.

Fortunately, if you missed the actual live event, you can relive the excitement and emotion via a film entitled Batkid Begins: The Wish Heard Around the World.

In the documentary, Make-A-Wish officials detail the time leading up to the event, chronicling just how the stunt was pulled together, and openly expressing shock at how the campaign went viral.

Dana Nachman and Liza Meak produced the film, which was released theatrically in 2015.

In November 2018, Miles turned 10 years old, marking 5 years in remission, and was considered cancer-free. And, on the tenth anniversary of Batkid day, an update was posted about the boy who’s efforts fighting both a deadly disease as well as crime as a superhero inspired people worldwide.(See video below. Recommendation – watch after you view the film.)

What made the events of that day, and the involvement of so many people, so special is, as one commentator in the film says, “In helping [Miles] to live this dream, we were saving ourselves,” as another adds, “He gave everyone license to …live their dreams.”

TITLE: “Batkid Begins: The Wish Heard Around the World” RUNTIME: 1h 29m WHERE TO FIND IT: Streaming on HBO Max, Apple TV+ Prime Video, and Vudu.