The Records:$871.5 million
Worldwide boxoffice cume
$489.4 million
Domestic boxoffice cume
(second highest ever)
$158.4 million
Opening weekend (best ever)
$49.8 million
Worldwide Imax gross (highest ever)
34%
Percentage of Imax viewers seeing the film for at least the second time
18
Days to reach the $400 million domestic benchmark (fastest ever)
Sue Kroll had been in her job as Warner Bros. president of worldwide marketing for less than a week when her office phone rang. A friend implored her to look at the news online immediately.
"At first I thought it was a rumor," recalls Kroll of that tragic afternoon in January. "I didn't believe it was true."
Heath Ledger, co-star of the studio's highly anticipated summer tentpole "The Dark Knight" and the centerpiece of Warners' meticulously planned marketing campaign, had been found dead in his New York apartment.
On the Burbank lot that day, many more phones were about to start buzzing.
"It was just this incredibly quick sequence of calls," Kroll remembers. She talked to producers Chuck Roven and Emma Thomas, production president Jeff Robinov and president/COO Alan Horn.
Horn's first priority, he says, was to reach out to Ledger's mother and father in Australia and offer his condolences. All the movie's marketing materials would be run past the family, he promised them.
"We were already out with the 'Why so serious?' campaign," he notes. "We said (to Ledger's family), 'Look, is this an issue? Would you like us to pull this?' And here's what they said: 'Heath loved the movie, was very proud of it. This was just an accident.' They were fine with it -- more than fine, they were completely supportive."
Nearly six months later, Ledger's performance as the Joker helped power "The Dark Knight" to a best-ever $18.5 million opening-night take. It was the first in a cavalcade of domestic boxoffice records shattered by a film that has survived a host of challenges to become the highest-grossing Warners release of all time ($489.4 million and counting).
"No one could have anticipated this kind of success," Horn reflects. "It surprised us. And, once in a while, it is kind of fun to be surprised on the upside."
The upside -- and the start of "Dark Knight's" adventure -- commenced in June 2005, when director Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins" grossed $72.9 million in its first five days.
It went on to take in $372 million worldwide -- healthy, but nowhere near as strong as some had hoped.
Contrary to reports that the movie had lost money for the studio and co-financier Legendary Pictures, it did well enough for them to immediately set the wheels in motion for a sequel.
"If you look at the performance of ('Begins') in theaters, on DVD, and just how much the fan base really loved the movie, there was never any question for us," says Legendary CEO Thomas Tull. "We just loved what Chris did from day one and were very excited about going back on the journey with him."
Nolan could have leaped to another large-scale movie, but instead he signed on to direct again after developing the story with David S. Goyer. Subsequently, he recruited his brother, Jonathan "Jonah" Nolan, to co-write the script, and his wife, Emma Thomas, returned to produce along with Roven.
Luckily for Warners, the key cast -- including Christian Bale, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Gary Oldman -- had signed on to reprise their roles, although Katie Holmes declined to return and was replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Aaron Eckhart was added as Harvey Dent/Two-Face.
But it was a casting that initially drew criticism in certain fanboy quarters that was the most intriguing: that of Ledger as the Joker. After his Oscar-nominated turn as a repressed gay cowboy in 2005's "Brokeback Mountain," he seemed an odd choice to some.
"Ledger has always struck me as a bit of a stiff," wrote Josh Tyler on the Cinema Blend Web site in July 2006, when rumors of the casting first surfaced. "Ledger seems spectacularly unsuited to the weirdness of the Joker."
Once production began in April 2007, the filmmakers faced another major challenge. As with "Begins," Nolan eschewed heavy CGI in favor of real stunts.
A sequence in which Batman jumps from a Hong Kong skyscraper and hitches a ride on a passing C-130 cargo plane was shot 88 stories above the city. After weeks of preproduction, a stuntman hung off a helicopter while a second copter with a camera captured it all. [Source from: hollywoodreporter.com]
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