The Dark Knight

• 1. Introduction

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  The Dark Knight, a 2008 superhero film directed by Christopher Nolan, begins with a bank robbery that turns on its own crew. The bank belongs to the mafia in Gotham City. The masked robbers betray and kill one another until a single man remains. He reveals himself as the mastermind, the Joker, and escapes with the money. The film is a sequel to Batman Begins from 2005, yet it feels less like a comic-book adventure and more like a crime story. How did that happen? Why did the choice of actor for its villain provoke so much public doubt? What became of that actor before audiences saw the result? And how did the reaction to the film end up changing the rules of the Academy Awards?

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• 2. Writing the Joker

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  Warner Bros. Pictures wanted a sequel as soon as Batman Begins proved a success, but Christopher Nolan had not planned to make one. He doubted the first film would earn enough to justify a follow-up. During filming he and co-writer David Goyer still traded ideas, and Goyer sketched an outline covering two further films. Nolan remained unsure how to continue the story in a way that felt consistent and relevant. One idea did interest him: using the Joker in the same grounded, realistic style. Talks with the studio began shortly after Batman Begins reached theaters, and development started once Nolan had finished The Prestige in 2006.

  Three months of work between Goyer and Nolan produced the core plot points, all built around escalation. Batman's extraordinary campaign against ordinary crime would provoke an opposing escalation from criminals. That response would attract the Joker, who treats terrorism as a weapon. The joker playing card at the end of Batman Begins had been meant to hint that Batman's hope for a short war on crime was a fallacy.

  Goyer admired the 1989 Batman, with Jack Nicholson as the Joker, but he did not find that version frightening. He wanted a Joker who arrived fully formed and unknowable, like the shark in Jaws from 1975. That meant no "cliché" origin story and no narrative arc. Both men felt that villains such as Hannibal Lecter and Darth Vader had lost menace once later films explained their pasts. Nolan called their film the "rise of the Joker". He also said it expressed his own "fear of anarchy", and that the Joker is "somebody who wants to just tear down the world around him."

  The Joker still had ancestors. The Nolans studied the traits shared by his many incarnations, and they borrowed from Dr. Mabuse, the villain of Fritz Lang's films. Alan Moore's 1988 graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke did not shape the main plot. Even so, its idea of a Joker partly driven to prove that anyone can become like him helped Christopher give purpose to an "inherently purposeless" character. The brothers later realized they had accidentally written a Joker close to his first appearance in Batman #1 from 1940.

  Harvey Dent sits at the center of the script. He is the figure caught between Batman, who believes Dent is the hero Gotham needs, and the Joker, who wants to prove that even the most righteous person can be corrupted. Christopher said the title refers to Dent as much as to Batman, since Dent has a duality much like Batman's. Because the story leaned on Dent, Bruce Wayne stayed a largely static character without a dramatic change.

  Jonathan Nolan spent six months, with his brother's help, turning the story into a draft screenplay. He then spent two more months refining it while Christopher finished directing The Prestige. The brothers wrote the final script together over six months of pre-production. Jonathan found the ending the most interesting part. It had always shown Batman fleeing from police, but the escape changed from a leap across rooftops to a ride on the Batpod, his motorcycle-like vehicle. The line Jonathan considered most important arrived late in development: "you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

  The tone came from crime cinema. The Godfather from 1972 and Heat from 1995 left their mark, as did Frank Miller's serious 1980s Batman comics. So did the limited series Batman: The Long Halloween, published in 1996-1997, which explores the relationship between Batman, Dent, and Gordon.

  The final scene has the Joker say that he and Batman are destined to battle forever. The writers did not mean it as a tease for another film. They meant it to show two opposites locked in conflict because neither will kill the other.

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• 3. Casting Choices

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  In August 2006, Heath Ledger's casting as the Joker drew criticism from some industry professionals and members of the public who thought him wrong for the part. Executive producer Charles Roven said Ledger was the only actor seriously considered, and he expected the warm reception of Batman Begins to ease concerns. Nolan knew that Nicholson's popular Joker would invite comparisons. He wanted an actor who could handle that scrutiny, and conversations with Ledger convinced him they shared a vision for the character. Ledger admitted some trepidation about following Nicholson but said the challenge excited him.

  Ledger described his version as a "psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy", and he avoided humanizing him. His reference points included Alex from the crime film A Clockwork Orange, released in 1971, and the British musicians Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious. He spent about a month secluded in a hotel room, reading comic books. He built the voice by mixing a high pitch with a low one, inspired by ventriloquist performances, and he designed a fighting style that looked improvised and erratic. A further four months went into a "Joker diary" of images and elements he thought would resonate with the character.

  Ledger later said of the role: "It's the most fun I've had with a character and probably will ever have... It was an exhausting process. At the end of the day, I couldn't move. I couldn't talk. I was absolutely wrecked." In a November 2007 interview he explained that he struggled to quiet his mind whenever he committed to a part. During filming he often slept only two hours a night.

  For Harvey Dent, Nolan wanted an all-American "heroic presence", something like Robert Redford with an undercurrent of anger or darkness. Josh Lucas, Ryan Phillippe, and Mark Ruffalo were considered, along with Matt Damon, who could not commit because of scheduling conflicts. Nolan settled on Aaron Eckhart, who had the all-American charm and an "aura... of a good man pushed too far". Eckhart drew on the Kennedy family, especially Robert F. Kennedy, who fought organized crime with an idealistic view of the law. He and Nolan agreed to ignore Tommy Lee Jones's colorful Two-Face in Batman Forever from 1995, with its pink hair and split designer suit. They chose a slightly burnt suit in neutral tones instead.

  Christian Bale said Bruce Wayne had changed from a young, naive, angry man seeking purpose into a hero burdened by the sense that his war on crime might never end. A more agile Batsuit let him show more of his Keysi fighting training. Nolan had deliberately obscured the combat in the first film because it showed Batman from the criminals' point of view. Gary Oldman called James Gordon the "moral center" of the film. Maggie Gyllenhaal replaced Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes after Holmes chose to star in the crime comedy Mad Money from 2008. Gyllenhaal treated Rachel as a new character and worked with Nolan so that she would matter despite a relatively minor role.

  Some casting plans fell through. Musician Dwight Yoakam turned down a role as the bank manager or a corrupt police officer because he was recording an album. Hong Kong actor Edison Chen did appear in the film, but most of his role was cut after he became involved in a sex photo scandal.

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• 4. Gotham On Location

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  Nolan wanted about 40 minutes of the film shot with IMAX cameras, a high-resolution system that uses 70 mm film instead of the usual 35 mm. Most of the film used Panavision's Panaflex Millennium XL and Platinum cameras. IMAX had mainly served documentaries, so this became the first major motion picture to use it. Warner Bros. hesitated. The cameras were large and unwieldy, and buying and processing the film stock cost up to four times as much as standard 35 mm. Nolan answered that cameras fit for Mount Everest could handle The Dark Knight. Cinematographer Wally Pfister and his crew began training on the equipment in January 2007 to test whether it was feasible. The finished film contains about 28 minutes of IMAX footage, between 15 and 20 percent of the running time.

  The robbery that opens the film was the first scene shot. It took five days at the Old Chicago Main Post Office. It was scheduled early so the IMAX process could be tested, with the option to refilm using traditional cameras. Pfister called it a week of patience and learning, partly because the IMAX footage took four days to be processed.

  Scouting in October 2006 covered Liverpool, Glasgow, London, and parts of Yorkshire, along with several American cities. Nolan chose Chicago because he liked it and thought its architecture was interesting without being as recognizable as New York City's. He also wanted to trade the natural settings of Batman Begins, such as the Himalayas and caverns, for a modern, ordered city that the Joker could take apart. Production designer Nathan Crowley said Chicago's clean lines suited the urban crime drama they wanted. With Wayne Manor destroyed in the earlier film, Wayne moved into a sparse modern penthouse that reflected his loneliness.

  Principal photography began on the 18th of April 2007 in Chicago, on a budget of $185 million. The crew worked under the fake title Rory's First Kiss, but media publications quickly uncovered the production's true nature. In July, three weeks went to the truck chase, mostly on Wacker Drive, a multi-level street closed overnight. Nolan added a SWAT van crashing through a concrete barricade. On LaSalle Street the crew performed a practical truck-flip stunt for real.

  Navy Pier on Lake Michigan stood in for Gotham Harbor in the ferry climax. Scouts searched for more than a month without finding suitable vessels. Construction coordinator Joe Ondrejko and his team solved the problem by building ferry facades on top of barges. The entire sequence was filmed in one day, with 800 extras moved through makeup and wardrobe in shifts.

  A shot of Batman surveying the city from a rooftop edge was filmed on Willis Tower, Chicago's tallest building. Stuntman Buster Reeves was due to double for Batman, but Christian Bale persuaded the filmmakers to let him do it himself. The owners of the in-construction Trump International Hotel and Tower refused permission for a stunt in which Batman suspends a SWAT team from the building. That stunt was shot from the fortieth floor of a separate building site. In August, a former Brach's candy factory on Cicero Avenue, scheduled for demolition, became the Gotham General Hospital explosion. Chicago filming ended on the 1st of September 2007 after thirteen weeks, which were estimated to have brought $45 million to the city's economy.

  In England, the crew worked at Pinewood Studios and Cardington Airfield. The Bat Bunker took six weeks to build inside a Cardington hangar, and a surrounding gantry had to be built to hold its roof and lighting. At Battersea Power Station, a listed building, a false wall lined with explosives protected the original structure. Nearby residents called emergency services, believing the blast was a terrorist attack.

  Ledger directed and mainly filmed the Joker's homemade videos himself. Michael Caine said he forgot his lines during one scene because Ledger's performance was so "stunning". In the interrogation scene, Ledger asked Bale to hit him for real. Bale declined, so Ledger cracked and dented the walls by throwing himself around.

  The final nine days took place in Hong Kong. The crew shot aerial footage from atop the International Finance Centre and a stunt in which Batman catches an in-flight C-130 aircraft. A planned stunt of Batman leaping between two skyscrapers was canceled because local authorities refused permission to use helicopters. Pfister described the officials as a "nightmare". The 127-day shoot ended on the 15th of November 2007, on time and under budget. Editing was underway by January 2008.

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• 5. Design, Music, and Loss

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  Special effects supervisor Chris Corbould oversaw about 700 effects shots produced by the studios Double Negative and Framestore. That was relatively few for a film of this size, because Nolan used computer-generated imaging only where practical effects could not do the job. The Gotham General Hospital explosion was not in the script. Corbould suggested it during filming because he believed it could be done.

  Nathan Crowley designed the Batpod because Nolan did not want to lean heavily on the Tumbler again. It grew from a prototype that Crowley and Nolan built from commercial model components, and Corbould's team built the real vehicle. Its wide tires made it unwieldy, and only stuntman Jean Pierre Goy could ride it, after months of training. The Batsuit was redesigned for comfort and flexibility, using a stretchy material covered with over 100 urethane armor pieces.

  Sculptor Julian Murray designed Dent's burnt face from Nolan's request for a skeletal look. His early versions were "too real and more horrifying", so he settled on a more "fanciful" and detailed design that was less repulsive. A designer named Hemming created the Joker's overall appearance, drawing on fashion-and-music celebrities for a modern, trendy feel. Nolan suggested the 1953 painting Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Francis Bacon as another influence. The outfit combines a purple coat, a green vest, an antique shirt, and a thin 1960s-style tie that Ledger suggested.

  Prosthetics supervisor Conor O'Sullivan partly based the Joker's scars on a scarred delivery man he had met. John Caglione Jr designed an "organic" makeup meant to look as though it had been worn for days, partly inspired by more of Bacon's works. During application he told Ledger to scrunch up his face, so that different cracks and textures formed once Ledger relaxed. Ledger always applied the lipstick himself, because he thought it essential to the character.

  James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer, who had scored Batman Begins, returned because Nolan wanted musical continuity between the films. They recorded at Air Studios in London and composed without seeing the film. Nolan wanted them inspired by the characters and story rather than by particular on-screen moments. They divided the work by character. Howard took Dent and Zimmer took Batman and the Joker. Howard wrote about ten minutes of music for Dent, using brass for both his heroic and corrupt sides and warping the sound as he fell. Zimmer wrote Batman's theme so that it did not sound "super", since he did not see Batman as strictly noble.

  For the Joker, Zimmer first wanted a single note. He described it this way: "imagine one note that starts off slightly agitated and then goes to serious aggravation and finally rips your head off at the end". He could not make that work and settled on two notes with alternating tempos and a "punk" influence. Kraftwerk and his own work with the rock band The Damned fed into the sound. He blended electronic and orchestral music and altered almost every note after recording, to imitate sounds including thunder and razors. In one experiment he asked musicians to start on a single note and drift slowly to a second over three minutes. That ran against their training, and it took several months to get the result he wanted.

  In January 2008, Ledger died at the age of 28 from an accidental overdose of a prescription drug. A rumor that his commitment to the role had damaged his mental state circulated, but it was later refuted. Nolan called the editing "tremendously emotional" and said he felt lucky to have something productive to do with a performance Ledger was proud of. Because Nolan preferred capturing sound on set to re-recording dialogue later, Ledger's work was already complete. Nolan did not change the Joker's story in response. Zimmer considered discarding the Joker's theme for a more traditional one, but he and Howard decided to honor Ledger's performance.

  Lead editor Lee Smith and Nolan took what was described as an aggressive approach to reach a running time of 152 minutes. Nolan said no scenes were deleted, because unnecessary material had been cut before filming. At one stage they removed so much that the story became incomprehensible, and they added scenes back. The finished film carries a dedication to Ledger and to stuntman Conway Wickliffe, who died during rehearsals for a Tumbler stunt.

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• 6. The Viral Campaign

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  In May 2007, Joker playing cards bearing the phrase "I believe in Harvey Dent" began turning up inside comic books at stores across the United States. They were the first move in a campaign built by 42 Entertainment, a company that develops alternate reality games, which are puzzle-driven stories played out in the real world. Nolan wanted the team to counter the negative reaction to Ledger's casting and to control how the Joker's appearance was revealed. The game was paced over annual events and drew on the comics The Killing Joke, The Long Halloween, and Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth from 1989.

  Warner Bros. rejected several ideas on safety grounds or for taste. These included Jokerized Santas at Christmas, coffins filled with chattering teeth on Mother's Day, and Batman actors on rooftops. The Mother's Day idea would have mocked Wayne's late mother.

  The playing cards led fans to a website where they could submit e-mail addresses to reveal a single pixel of a hidden Joker image. About 97,000 addresses and 20 hours were needed to reveal the whole picture, and fans responded well. At San Diego Comic-Con, 42 Entertainment altered 11,000 one-dollar bills with the Joker's image and the phrase "Why So Serious?". The bills led finders to a location. The original plan was to throw them from a balcony, but safety concerns canceled it, so the bills were covertly handed out to attendees. Organizers expected a few thousand people. In total, 650,000 arrived and joined activities such as calling a number taken from a plane flying overhead and wearing Joker makeup to stage disruptive acts with actors.

  Around the world, fans photographed letters on signs to assemble a ransom note. A United States effort sent people to recover Nokia cellphones from a cake. Nokia was a brand partner of the film, and the hunt led to an early screening of the bank-robbery prologue ahead of the public release in December. Ledger's appearance there was well received and changed the conversation about his casting.

  After Ledger died, the campaign continued unchanged, focusing on Dent's election. The ongoing 2008 United States presidential election influenced that approach. Warner Bros. worried that the public knew little about Dent, so the campaign added signs, stickers, and "Dentmobiles" that visited American cities. It ended in July with displays of the Bat-Signal in Chicago and New York City, which the Joker eventually defaced. Industry professionals considered the campaign innovative and successful.

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• 7. Records and Rules

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  On the 14th of July 2008, a block of Broadway in New York City was closed for the premiere, held in IMAX. Howard and Zimmer performed the score live. The Hollywood Reporter said Ledger received several ovations, and that Warner Bros. executives at the after-party struggled to balance celebration with remembrance.

  The year had looked difficult for studios. Box-office revenue in 2007 reached $9.7 billion, and analysts expected less in 2008, citing rising living costs, election fatigue, and a crowded field of comedies. Few sequels were scheduled, and only four, including The Dark Knight, were predicted to be blockbusters. The film still had strong signs in its favor: high anticipation, positive pre-release reviews, and a record $3.5 million in IMAX pre-sales. Analysts expected an opening weekend above Iron Man's $102.1 million but below the record $151.1 million of Spider-Man 3. They also noted that its long running time limited daily screenings. Batman films carried a perceived ceiling too, since the 1989 installment remained the franchise's top earner.

  The prediction fell short. The Dark Knight opened widely in the United States and Canada on the 18th of July 2008, in a record 4,366 theaters. It took $158.4 million over the weekend, beating the record of Spider-Man 3. Friday alone brought in $67.2 million, a single-day record, and the midnight opening earned $18.5 million from 3,000 midnight screenings. The weekend as a whole, at $253.6 million, became the highest-grossing weekend on record. The first week reached $238.6 million. The film passed $400 million faster than any film before it, in 18 days, and reached $500 million in 45 days. Younger audiences returned for repeat viewings, and the crowd was split evenly between those under 25 and those 25 or older.

  It held the top spot for four weekends, until Tropic Thunder displaced it in the fifth. In late January 2009, with the film playing in fewer than 100 theaters, Warner Bros. relaunched it in 300 theaters to raise its profile during nominations for the 81st Academy Awards. The domestic total reached $533.3 million by the time it left theaters on the 5th of March, after 33 weeks. Abroad it earned about $469.7 million, with the United Kingdom its largest market at $89.1 million. Warner Bros. chose not to release it in China, blaming "a number of pre-release conditions... as well as cultural sensitivities to some elements of the film". The reissue pushed the worldwide total past $1 billion in February, and it ended at $1.003 billion. It was the first superhero film to reach that mark and the highest-grossing film of 2008.

  Awards followed. Ledger won Best Supporting Actor at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the British Academy Film Awards, and the Golden Globes. Before the 81st Academy Awards, the industry debated whether he would become only the seventh person nominated posthumously, and whether his death or his performance would drive the vote. Academy voters had also generally ignored comic-book films. Ledger won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, becoming only the second performer to win posthumously, after Peter Finch in 1977. The Dark Knight became the first comic-book adaptation to win an Academy acting award. It also won for Best Sound Editing and received six further nominations, for art direction, cinematography, film editing, makeup, sound mixing, and visual effects.

  The film was not nominated for Best Picture, and some publications called that a "snub". The response was seen as the peak of several years of criticism that the academy ignored popular, high-performing films. For the 82nd Academy Awards in 2010, the academy raised the limit for Best Picture nominees from five to ten, a change known as "The Dark Knight Rule". It made room for broadly popular but respected films including District 9, The Blind Side, Avatar, and Up, the first animated film nominated in two decades. The Hollywood Reporter argued that the academy had mistaken a call to honor important genre films for a call to nominate more films. The change is also seen as responsible for the first Best Picture nomination of a comic-book adaptation, Black Panther in 2018.

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• 8. Themes and Legacy

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  Metacritic gave The Dark Knight a weighted score of 85 out of 100 from 41 critics, a rating it labels "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an average grade of "A". Roger Ebert said the film, alongside Iron Man, expanded what superhero movies could do by joining comic-book tropes to real-world events. Manohla Dargis saw in its treatment of chaos, fear, and death a sign "that American movies have entered a new era of ambivalence when it comes to their heroes or maybe just superness".

  Not every critic agreed. Some found the grim, self-serious tone short of fun or fantasy. David Denby called the film a product of a "time of terror" that embraced fear while cynically setting up a sequel. Stephanie Zacharek and David Edelstein felt that exposition replaced visual storytelling and that the plot was hard to follow amid the fast pace and loud score. Fight scenes were criticized for being hard to see clearly, though the opening robbery was praised as among the film's best. Praise for Ledger was near-unanimous, with the caveat that his death made the role both anticipated and difficult to watch. The Village Voice wrote that the performance would have made him a legend even if he had lived. Bale's reception was mixed, and Variety considered Eckhart's subplot the film's weakest.

  Goyer and Nolan did not set out to include parallels to terrorism, the war on terror, or the laws enacted to combat it. They felt overtly political statements would detract from the story. Critics saw them anyway. Siddhant Adlakha argued that the Joker symbolizes the constructed, unknowable face of modern terrorism. Historian Stephen Prince read the film as a study of what happens when civil and government authorities abandon rules in the fight against terror. The scene of Batman standing in the ruins of a destroyed building recalls the World Trade Center site after September 11.

  Readers split on its politics. Author Andrew Klavan said Batman stands in for then-president George W. Bush, justifying the breach of civil rights during an emergency. Other publications read the film as anti-war, arguing that society risks creating the conditions for escalation if it abandons the rule of law. Writer Benjamin Kerstein said both views are valid, calling the film "a perfect mirror of the society which is watching it". The debate sharpens in the final act, when Batman co-opts the phones of Gotham's citizens to locate the Joker. Adlakha called it a "militaristic fantasy" reminiscent of the 2001 Patriot Act. Lucius Fox threatens to stop helping, and Batman destroys the system, though the film shows he could not have stopped the Joker in time without it.

  Moral choices drive the drama as much as politics. Ebert observed that the Joker forces impossible ethical decisions on each character to test the limits of their morality. Dent is the city's "white knight", and Adlakha noted that his slogan, "I believe in Harvey Dent", frames him as a religious icon. His two-headed coin lets him control the outcome of his choices. After Rachel's death, the coin is scarred on one side, and he submits himself to chance. English professor Daniel Boscaljon argued that Dent is not simply broken. He believes in a different form of justice, and he flips the coin because it is "Unbiased. Unprejudiced. Fair."

  The Joker has no identity to hide, with or without his makeup. He burns a towering pile of cash to prove that "everything burns". He tells Batman: "I'm not a monster... I'm just ahead of the curve." The ferry scene can be read as his true defeat, because the passengers refuse to turn on each other. Writer David Chen saw hope in the idea that people cannot handle power responsibly alone but can share the responsibility. Batman answers by taking the blame for Dent's crimes, a "noble lie" that Martin Fradley and others read as a cynical endorsement of deception. Alfred tells a lie of his own when he burns Rachel's letter choosing Dent, to spare Bruce the pain.

  The film is considered a "blueprint" for many modern superhero films, mainly for rejecting the usual comic-book style. Many filmmakers copied its gritty, realistic tone, with uneven results. Its reach extended beyond theaters. The DVD and Blu-ray release in December 2008 sold 3 million copies on its first day in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and Blu-ray accounted for around 600,000 of them. The animated film Batman: Gotham Knight, released in July 2008, tells six vignettes in different artistic styles and brought back Kevin Conroy as Batman. A sequel, The Dark Knight Rises, completed the trilogy in 2012. In 2020, the United States Library of Congress selected The Dark Knight for preservation in the National Film Registry.

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