Despite all of the box office records being shattered, perhaps the biggest revelation about The Dark Knight's opening weekend was who was sitting in the audience. The conventional wisdom about superhero movies, to be sure, is that they attract teenage male nerds and older male nerds who think they're still teenage nerds. But a reported 48 percent of The Dark Knight's audience was female, and that number probably would have been even higher had so many women not flocked to Mamma Mia!
Whether they were drawn by the rubberneck curiosity surrounding Ledger's last fully realized performance or simply felt that this comic-book movie had something to say to them, too, The Dark Knight's audience represents a huge demographic shift for studio marketers to wrap their heads around. ''Both actors, Heath and Christian [Bale], certainly have a lot of female appeal,'' says Thomas Tull, chairman and CEO of Legendary Pictures, the film's executive producer, adding, ''You look at this cast and it could just as easily do Shakespeare as a Batman film.'' For years, studios have whispered about the four-quadrant hit — a movie that appeals equally to men, women, young, and old — as something as elusive and mythical as a Himalayan yeti. This time, here it was, staring them in the face.
While on some level the fusillade of hype surrounding The Dark Knight was as Barnum-esque as any summer tentpole flick (toys, tie-ins, and even a Domino's Gotham City Pizza, which was essentially its regular pizza with more pepperoni), the studio found the tricky balance between creating buzz and ramming its movie down everyone's throats. Especially when it came to promoting the late Ledger's performance — a potential PR land mine if not handled delicately. ''It certainly was challenging,'' admits Kroll, adding that the studio talked with Ledger's family about how much hype was too much. ''I mean this was obviously a tragedy unlike anything I've had to deal with. It was devastating.'' With a marketing campaign that led the most curious diehards to Dark Knight websites and leaked the first photos of the Joker virally, Warner fine-tuned the Hollywood hype machine to a point where you actually had to see The Dark Knight in order to find out for yourself what all of the hoopla was about.
NEXT PAGE: Audiences are so familiar now with the tropes and themes of superhero movies that it's refreshing (revolutionary, really) when one of them takes you someplace new — even if that place is the abyss.
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