That scene in The Dark Knight when Ledger impales a man's head with a pencil? The one that got postponed in Chicago last July? It's terrific in the finished film. Almost as good as the one in which the Joker flips an 18-wheeler truck during a high-speed chase with the Bat Pod. Or when he slips into a nurse's dress and shimmies down a Gotham City street, coolly setting off fireballs of explosions behind him with a remote-controlled detonator.
Last January, however, there was reason for Warner Bros. to be nervous. The media frenzy over Ledger's death was going full tilt, with every news network broadcasting footage of his corpse being loaded into the back of an ambulance. Filming on The Dark Knight had wrapped in November, but what if Ledger's performance needed voice looping or — worse — reshoots? And what about the marketing? How would the studio sell the movie when audiences now knew the tragic fate of its villain? ''We didn't want to do anything that would seem exploitative,'' says Jeff Robinov, president of Warner Bros. Pictures Group. (Exploitative includes talking to the press about Heath; virtually everyone interviewed in this story clearly would have preferred to discuss any other aspect of the film.) As for possible reshoots, Nolan says that wasn't a problem. ''I've never done any reshoots on anything,'' he says. ''I've never had to loop more than a couple of lines in any of my films.''
Ultimately, the studio decided to leave Ledger's face in the publicity stills and release the trailers that showcased his performance. It even went ahead with a Joker action figure, which looks more like a character out of The Nightmare Before Christmas than it does Ledger, but never mind. It's a testament to the actor's talent that when the lights go down in the theater, and The Dark Knight starts unspooling, it's shockingly easy to forget that he's gone. It's only later, walking to the parking lot, the reality sinks in again.
Perversely — or maybe predictably — the tragedy of Ledger's death may draw ticket buyers who aren't Batman fans but who want to pay the actor their last respects (or who just want to gawk at his ghost). In any case, advance ticket sales for The Dark Knight, as well as some gushing early reviews, suggest that the opening-weekend numbers are going to be huge. Some observers already predict that the movie could surpass Spider-Man to become the highest-grossing comic-book-based movie of all time. In an irony the Joker would appreciate, Heath Ledger's last film is about to be the biggest hit of his life.
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