The first surprising thing about The Dark Knight is that it largely lives up to its hype. The even more surprising--and gratifying--thing is, it is being rewarded for doing so.
Not that it reinvents the wheel or anything, but The Dark Knight is the first mega-blockbuster in ages to tell a coherent story, maintain interest all the way through to the end and have something resembling a point-of-view. In more enlightened times, such was the bare minimum we might expect from our entertainment, but these days, movies can be smash hits even though nobody actually likes them.
Heavily promoted Event Pictures like the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise, the increasingly dreadful Shrek series or the misbegotten Spiderman 3 somehow manage to earn huge sums of money on their opening weekends, enough to guarantee sequels and follow-ups and imitations, even though the lack of repeat business for these movies--the grosses always fall sharply after that first weekend--would seem to indicate a general lack of audience love.
But these movies weren't made to be loved, or even enjoyed; they were made to earn money. When production budgets routinely sail over a hundred million bucks, nobody's going to take any crazy risks. Movies don't even come from studios anymore. They're deals produced with assorted outside moneymen, which is why you see logos for mysterious entities like Village Roadshow and Legendary Pictures and Virtual Studios alongside the familiar Warner Bros. shield or Universal globe. The days when a maverick studio head like Robert Evans or Alan Ladd, Jr. might take a chance like hiring that Coppola guy for their big-budget gangster movie or giving that Lucas kid money for his dopey-sounding space epic are gone. There is no balance between commerce and art anymore.
So The Dark Knight came into being only as a follow-up to Christopher Nolan's previous Batman epic, and Nolan likely only got the gig in the first place due to coincidence. (Warners desperately wanted to restart their superhero franchise, and Nolan had made a couple of modest hits, so they handed him the reins. They could as easily have picked Brett Ratner or McG or any such hack.) In any event, he comes through like a champ with The Dark Knight. With clean, easily read images and sure, swift (but never hurried) pacing reminiscent of Don Siegel in his prime, this is a model of commercial filmmaking.
And audiences can tell. The huge opening weekend was guaranteed, but its almost equally profitable second weekend is virtually unprecedented these days. People are going back to see it a second time because they actually like it. And not just fanboys; it seems to be appealing to a wider spectrum than anticipated, presumably because of strong reviews and great word-of-mouth.
How will Hollywood react to this? Will they decide audiences deserve better than an endless chain of product? Will they realize there could be more money to be made if they give people things that are actually good? Or will they keep churning out the same old crap?
We know the answer to that last one, don't we?
