The Wall Street Journal-20080124-Will Marketing Change After Star-s Death-
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Will Marketing Change After Star's Death?
For nearly nine months, Internet-savvy movie fans have been tantalized by a Web marketing campaign to slowly unveil the new look for one of Hollywood's most popular characters: the Joker, nemesis to Batman and a central figure in the next installment of the Warner Bros. film franchise based on the Caped Crusader.
Tuesday, however, Warner Bros.' careful online campaign, which still has months left to run, took an unexpected turn when Heath Ledger, the 28-year-old actor playing the Joker in "The Dark Knight," was found dead in a New York apartment.
The tragedy will force the studio to ponder how or whether to continue the elaborate Web campaign that was already generating buzz for one of its most important movie properties. That question is made even trickier by the fact that the campaign, to date, has been largely built around Mr. Ledger's Joker, even though Christian Bale returns as Batman. The Joker character became film legend in an earlier incarnation of the Batman series, when Jack Nicholson won praise for his deranged take on the comic-book villain. Mr. Ledger's eagerly anticipated portrayal is, if anything, said to take the character to a new level of violence and intensity that is darker than Mr. Nicholson's Joker.
A spokeswoman for Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc., said the marketing campaign was continuing but declined to comment further.
The viral campaign of "The Dark Knight" began to appear out of nowhere in May. That's when an inaugural political advertisement for Harvey Dent, aspiring Gotham City district attorney, appeared online without mentioning any movie. IBelieveinHarveyDent.com featured a photo of the candidate and was "Paid for by Friends of Harvey Dent." By following clues sprinkled on Internet message boards, fans then were led to a second site: IBelieveinHarveyDentToo.com. The page was the same, but Mr. Dent's picture was defaced with blackened eyes and a ghastly red grin.
The site was a fake, the candidate photos were of actor Aaron Eckhart, and the Web pages were the beginning of an elaborate attempt to stir up interest among fans. Throughout the summer and fall of 2007, the campaign served up a labyrinthine adventure set in an alternate-reality Gotham City. The drive of the campaign was the slow reveal of the Joker as played by Mr. Ledger. The actor's death puts into question the future of the Joker-centric marketing push for "The Dark Knight" and whether Warner Bros. will change tactics rather than risk a negative public response.
At the defaced Harvey Dent Web page, fans could get a code that allowed them to remove a piece of the overlying image. As more fans participated, Mr. Dent disappeared pixel by pixel, displaying the first official photo of Mr. Ledger's Joker: a grim white face appearing out of the darkness with dead eyes and an erratic, ruby smile carved into his cheeks.
With a playful but psychotic tone, the Joker character kept movie fanboys guessing for months. In late October, he requested that they participate in a nationwide scavenger hunt. Fans took photos of letter-shaped landmarks all over the country. The letters formed a message: "The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules," which then dissolved into a fresh Joker image. In November, the Joker encouraged fans to submit images of them and friends painted with white faces and red smiles. Each game resulted in a new image of the Joker or a new site with a new quest. Fans were updated on viral developments by editors of popular film news sites like www.superherohype.com and aintitcool.com, among others.
In late fall, fictional newspaper the Gotham Times launched its Web site, www.thegothamtimes.com, where fans could read up on Batman's exploits or Mr. Dent's war on corruption. Readers then discovered a second newspaper, the HaHaHa Times, at www.thehahahatimes.com, which was a frightening version of the original paper with edits made by the Joker himself.
In December, the campaign subsided when "The Dark Knight" prologue was screened before IMAX showings of "I Am Legend" and the first full- length trailer for "The Dark Knight" made its debut. Both featured footage unveiling Mr. Ledger's performance.
Such campaigns aren't new, of course. "The Blair Witch Project" in 1999 established that young movie fans could be enticed by online games that hold their interest for months before a film's release. Online campaigns have now become a standard feature of the marketing for certain films, especially comic-book fare like Batman.
Mr. Ledger isn't featured just in the online campaign. The movie's current poster includes a ghostly and haunting image of Mr. Ledger in his Joker getup, with the tag line "Why So Serious?" scrawled in red. In recent interviews, Mr. Ledger said the Joker was the most-fun role he had ever undertaken but was taxing physically and emotionally.
The movie's viral campaign is the work of 42 Entertainment, a Pasadena, Calif., independent producer of alternate-reality multimedia environments. The goal was to create a multiplatform story bridging the 2005 film -- which cost $150 million to produce and sold about $370 million of tickets world-wide -- and its sequel.
Untimely deaths have interrupted movie marketing before -- from James Dean's 1955 death before "Giant" was released, to the accidental shooting of Brandon Lee on the set of "The Crow," to the murder of director/actress Adrienne Shelley in the run-up to "Waitress" last year.
Web movie campaigns often rely on movie fan sites to whip up and maintain interest in the online initiatives. "We usually help kick off campaigns by spreading the word, and fans take it from there," said Mirko Parlevliet of Coming Soon Media LP, which operates sites like comingsoon.net and superherohype.com.
Mr. Parlevliet said the viral campaign for "The Dark Knight" "was very detailed and got a great response from the fans," adding that fans were rewarded for participating by gaining access to trailers, posters and photos. Still, he says, "I personally don't think these games reach an audience beyond the Internet-savvy fans. . . . Also, [the studios] should concentrate more on a world-wide audience instead of just the U.S. fans."
Warner Bros. released a statement yesterday expressing its condolences on Mr. Ledger's death but didn't comment on the status of the film, which is in post-production in Los Angeles. It is possible that some of Mr. Ledger's sound-recording work was incomplete.
An executive at a rival studio said that while "The Dark Knight" is basically a big-budget movie with tragedy now attached to it, it would be unwise to change the marketing strategy or campaign at this point. "The best thing that could happen is that all this marketing stuff just goes on and the movie and the campaign don't turn into some kind of weird grave marker," he said.
