Marketing 'The Dark Knight'
'How do you take a character who's central to the entire plot of the film and pretend that he doesn't exist?' Farrah Louviere, movies marketing exec
He's featured in the billboards that tower over Manhattan and Sunset Boulevard. He's the central figure in trailers that are widely viewed on YouTube. His name is whispered pointedly as an Oscar contender. As Warner Brothers rolls out its publicity campaign for "The Dark Knight," the $180 million Batman movie that arrives in theaters Friday, the marketing seems centered, not on Batman himself, but on the man who plays the Joker: Heath Ledger.
And the fact that Ledger died of an accidental drug overdose in January hasn't diminished his profile a bit.
It's a tricky situation for a studio to face, movie marketing insiders say: how, if at all, to work around the death of your highest-profile star - mere months before he is to appear in the film that you hope will be a massive summer blockbuster. The dilemma isn't new. Robert Shaw, Natalie Wood, and Jean Harlow all died while working on movies. John Candy passed away while filming 1994's "Wagons East!" Brandon Lee died in a stunt accident during the filming of 1994's "The Crow."
"It's not an enviable position," said Farrah Louviere, director of film for the Los Angeles marketing agency Davie Brown Entertainment and former manager of worldwide promotions at Warner Bros. While she wasn't involved in the conception of the "Dark Knight" marketing campaign, Louviere said she understands why the studio has chosen to promote Ledger so vociferously.
"How do you take a character who's central to the entire plot of the film and pretend that he doesn't exist?" Louviere said. "I don't know how you do that and effectively market anything."
In the case of "The Dark Knight," the Joker is a figure of particular symbolism. This version of the Batman franchise is a departure in tone from the series that director Tim Burton launched in the late 1980s - less cartoonish, more darkly realistic. Warner Brothers is trying to convey the film as "this combination of quality filmmaking and a popcorn movie," said Toby Miller, who directs the film and visual culture program at the University of California, Riverside. "It's a very, very complicated mixture. That's why a level of seriousness goes alongside with marketing to 6-year-olds."
And when it comes to that seriousness, Ledger's role is pivotal. Compared with Jack Nicholson's Joker in the 1989 "Batman," Ledger's take on the role seems a feat of creepy realism. In photos and video clips, he's a disheveled, pouty figure with unkempt hair and a sometimes-muted voice - a villain as prone to sulking moodily as ranting melodramatically.
While Ledger was never a box office draw, his critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated role in 2005's "Brokeback Mountain" helped to lend "The Dark Knight" credibility. The role of the Joker itself is a venue for serious acting, Miller notes: The Batman films, he said, have "a really tragic quality to the villains that you don't get in a lot of action adventures."
Yet this remains an action adventure. And if "The Dark Knight" is meant to be art, it's also meant to be a merchandising bonanza, the spark for sales of toys and games to people who might not care about thespian skill. That's why the marketing campaign for a big-budget summer thriller - the sort of film that's known in the industry as a "tentpole" - can quickly reach epic proportions itself.
The studio's marketing cost alone can reach $35 million to $50 million, said Al Lieberman, a professor of marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business, whose former company, Grey Entertainment, worked with Warner Brothers to market the 1989 "Batman" and its sequels.
Add to that what promotional partners spend to advertise tie-in products, and the cost of marketing a film like "The Dark Knight" can easily exceed $100 million, Louviere said.
For this film, Louviere notes, the marketing campaign began more than a year before the release date, as hints of the movie were dropped in pop culture circles and spun into viral websites. From the start, she said, the Joker played a pivotal role in the promotion, in part because the studio wanted to stay mum on some of the other elements of the film - from Batman's array of high-tech toys to the makeup job on Harvey "Two-Face" Dent (Aaron Eckhart) - to give audiences an incentive to see the movie.
Given the prominent role Ledger played from the start, Louviere said, excising his name from the publicity materials might have felt even more artificial.
"I think it would have been a little more dark and a little harder for fans to grasp if his presence and his name were just overlooked in an attempt to be overly sensitive," Louviere said.
And audiences have seemed able to accept the death of a star, said Tom Sherak, former chairman of Twentieth Century Fox Domestic Film Group. Sherak said he now regrets his decision, at Fox, not to acquire "The Crow," which fared well at the box office.
"I forgot that the movie worked as a movie," Sherak said. "The fact that Brandon Lee died was neither positive or negative. It worked. Somehow I lost sight of that."
Sherak said he senses "no panic" in Hollywood over the upcoming release of "The Dark Knight." "The bottom line is that the movie is bigger than the sum of its parts," he said. "It's Batman."
Given how scientifically tested and focus-grouped movie publicity campaigns have become, "Dark Knight" marketers clearly concluded that audiences would accept Ledger's visibility, Miller said. Indeed, some of the film's pre-release publicity has centered around the way the film will serve as a tribute to Ledger's legacy. The movie will be released first in the actor's native Australia. A small tribute to Ledger is part of the end credits. And in numerous interviews, fellow actors and director Christopher Nolan have spoken about Ledger's dedication to his craft, and his conception of the Joker as a nihilistic villain who revels in destruction for its own sake.
But even that strategy can be risky, said Lieberman, the NYU marketing professor. "They really made a tremendous marketing thrust out of the fact that this guy plays a very evil and sick Joker," he said. "Now take it to the next step. Did that impact Heath?"
True, those involved in the film have denied that the dark role affected Ledger's mental state. But if audiences come to believe otherwise, "you could actually push people off," Lieberman said. "You don't want to have people turn this thing into a sympathy bath. . . . You're focusing on the character."
Sam Allis of the Globe staff contributed to this article. Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. 