Heath Ledger Made Everyone Forget That Superhero Movies Were Supposed to Be Fun

The Dark Knight opened on July 18, 2008, and the discourse was immediately about one thing: Heath Ledger's Joker. Ledger had died six months before the film's release, and the performance he left behind was so extraordinary that it transcended the superhero genre entirely. His Joker wasn't a villain — he was a philosophical argument in clown makeup, a chaos agent who exposed the fragility of every system he touched. The film grossed over a billion dollars, won Ledger a posthumous Academy Award, and proved that comic book movies could be serious art. This was, it turned out, a double-edged sword. Hollywood took the wrong lesson — that every superhero franchise needed to be "dark and gritty" — and spent the next decade producing joyless, desaturated blockbusters that confused solemnity with quality. The DC cinematic universe would chase Nolan's tone for fifteen years and never catch it. But none of that diminishes what The Dark Knight actually was: a crime thriller that happened to feature a man in a bat costume, anchored by a performance that was otherworldly in ways that became unbearably poignant.