Batman Is Back

There's a beautiful high-angle shot, early in The Dark Knight, that looks down on Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in full Batman regalia as he perches atop a Gotham skyscraper, surveying the city he lives to protect, then leaping off and spreading his majestic bat wings to swoop down into the night. Bruce's trajectory is also the film's. It traces a descent into moral anarchy, and each of its major characters will hit bottom. Some will never recover, broken by the touch of evil or by finding it, like a fatal infection, in themselves.
The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's second chapter in his revival of the DC Comics franchise, will hit theaters with all the hoopla and fanboy avidity of the summer season's earlier movies based on comic books. It's the fifth, and three of the first four (Iron Man, Wanted and Hellboy II) have been terrific or just short of it. (The Incredible Hulk: not so hot.) It's been one of the best summers in memory for flat-out blockbuster entertainment, and in the wow category, the Nolan film doesn't disappoint. True to format, it has a crusading hero, a sneering villain in Heath Ledger's Joker, spectacular chases — including one with Batman on a stripped-down Batmobile that becomes a motorcycle with monster-truck wheels — and lots of stuff blowing up. Even the tie-in action figures with Reese's Pieces suggest this is a fast-food movie.
But Nolan has a more subversive agenda. He wants viewers to stick their hands down the rat hole of evil and see if they get bitten. With little humor to break the tension, The Dark Knight is beyond dark. It's as black — and teeming and toxic — as the mind of the Joker. Batman Begins, the 2005 film that launched Nolan's series, was a mere five-finger exercise. This is the full symphony.
A Better Class of CriminalGotham has a new white knight: a fearless district attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who's determined to nab malefactors through the law with the same gusto that Batman, the dark knight, applies using his gadgets and charisma. The Mob (led by Eric Roberts) they can handle, with the help of stalwart police lieutenant James Gordon (Gary Oldman). But the Joker — this guy is nuts. He does deals with the Mob, then crosses them up. He makes a point with his pencil by ramming it into a gangster's head. "This town," he says, "deserves a better class of criminals." So do action movies, and here he is, vowing to bring down Batman and Dent, just for the mad fun of it.
In its rethinking and transcending of a schlock source, The Dark Knight is up there with David Cronenberg's 1986 version of The Fly. It turns pulp into dark poetry. Just as that movie found metaphors of cancer, AIDS and death in the story of a man devolving into an insect, so this one plumbs the nature of identity. Who are we? Has Bruce lost himself in the myth of the hero? Is his Batman persona a mission or an affliction? Can crusading Dent live down the nickname (Two-Face) some rancorous cops have pinned on him? Only the Joker seems unconflicted. He knows what he is: an "agent of chaos." Your worst nightmare.
No, really. This villain, as conceived by Nolan and his scriptwriter brother Jonathan and incarnated with chilling authority by Ledger, is not the elegant sadist of so many action films, nor the strutting showman played by Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman. He isn't a father figure or a macho man. And though he invents several stories about how he got his (facial and psychic) scars, he's not presented as the sum of injustices done to him. This Joker is simply one of the most twisted and mesmerizing creeps in movie history.

How Batman Broke the Record

Holy gargantuan grosses, Batman! Hollywood has just ridden to the most lucrative moviegoing weekend in film history on the cape of The Dark Knight. Christopher Nolan's gritty Batman sequel raked in $155 million between Friday and Sunday, outselling the previous top weekend grosser, 2007's Spider-Man 3, by more than $4 million and driving the movie business to a record $253 million weekend.
The Dark Knight's unprecedented box-office might is "mind-boggling for us," says Dan Fellman, president of domestic distribution for Warner Bros. Pictures. (TIME and Warner Bros. are both subsidiaries of Time Warner.) The film benefited from a unique mix of factors beyond the usual superhero movie hype, including a buzzed-about performance by the late Heath Ledger as the Joker, perfectly pitched marketing, agile distribution and gas prices that have made a night at the movies an attractive alternative to a summer road trip. It also helps that The Dark Knight, as most critics and audiences attest, is a very good film.
As early as last summer, months before Ledger's sudden death in January, Warner Bros. sensed that Nolan was filming something that might transcend mere fanboy fodder. With Batman Begins, in 2005, the director successfully rebooted the troubled franchise, but this time around his decision to go darker — and The Dark Knight is as mordant a superhero movie as there has ever been — dovetailed with the popular mood. "We saw the dailies coming in and we knew we had an incredible movie," says Fellman. Though Christian Bale's Batman is The Dark Knight's star, it was Ledger's knife-wielding anarchist around whom the studio built an early viral marketing campaign, featuring the villain prominently in posters, trailers and on the web site WhySoSerious.com.
After Ledger's death, curiosity about his performance — not always driven by the best of impulses — only grew. "It added to a certain mystique about the film," says Steve Mason, box-office analyst at FantasyMoguls.com. While Warner Bros. was anxious about appearing to capitalize on interest in Ledger's death as The Dark Knight's release date approached, it resumed showcasing Ledger in trailers. "The performance is so good, had they not highlighted it, it would have been a mistake," says Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office analysis firm Media By Numbers. In the end, Fellman says, "[Ledger] certainly is part of our great success."
In the weeks before opening, Bat-ticipation was ratcheted so high that Dark Knight screenings were selling out online as fast as theaters could add them. The AMC South Barrington in Chicago planned to show the movie on six screens and ended up ordering more prints in order to play it on 18. A planned Friday midnight showing at Hollywood's Cinerama Dome sold out so quickly, its adjoining theater, the ArcLight, added 13 midnight screenings. Those midnight shows broke another record, earning $18.5 million, to beat out Star Wars, Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith's 2005 record of $16.9 million. And those numbers don't include the hardy fans who stayed up for the 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. shows. Tickets to see the film on giant IMAX screens, which accounted for a record $6 million of the weekend's gross, also went fast, inspiring some ticket-holders to scalp them on eBay for as much as $80 a pop.
When it came to breaking box-office records, Batman wasn't flying solo. Universal's Mamma Mia! earned $27.6 million to snare the best opening for a musical, narrowly beating out last summer's Hairspray and helping propel the record weekend sales across the industry.
As for The Dark Knight, its future looks bright. Most blockbusters are built on first-weekend hype that quickly falls off as new films arrive in theaters, but audiences are spreading good word of mouth and, in some cases, returning to see the film on IMAX screens. Whether there'll be enough returns to put The Dark Knight in all-time box-office territory remains to be seen. But Hollywood appears to have its box-office superhero for 2008.