Heath Ledger Joker bobblehead, presented without comment.

• Is Bruce Wayne, as John Carney wonders at Dealbreaker, “exactly the ‘better class of criminal’ that the Joker describes”? Spoileriffic analysis of Batman’s white-collar misdeeds follows.
• Mike Jones weighs in on the sale of indieWIRE to SnagFilms. “Despite the owners’ (which included myself, to a very small extent) desire to sell under the right terms, indieWIRE seemed destined to be independent.” Buuut…”The difficult truth about being independent is that it’s mostly for the young.”
• Glenn “Lists are Bullshit” Kenny offers 14 numbered thoughts on Mamma Mia! He begins by contemplating “the comingled semens of Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard, and Colin Firth competing in the fallopian tubes of Meryl Streep”; he ends with the admission, “I kind of want to have sex with Christine Baranski.”

The Dark Knight is hands down the best Batman movie yet, but has Christopher Nolan painted himself into a corner by using up the only viable Batman villains? Most of the Batman villains left are either too campy (the Penguin, the Ventriloquist), depend too much on flexible comic book logic (Clayface, Killer Croc), or are just watered-down versions of the Joker (the Riddler, the Mad Hatter).

Tim Burton’s Batman featured The Joker (Jack Nicholson) for good reason. The Clown Prince of Crime, always Batman’s most threatening foe, represents (among many things) an unwillingness to take human life seriously. In that moral void his vibrant personality explodes like a fireworks display of mania, menace, and eccentricity. The Joker is the calling card of chaos and evil at its sexiest. Batman isn’t the reason we watch Batman over and over again, the Joker is. Of course Michael Keaton brings gravitas to Batman, but let’s face it–as sweet as Batman is, he’s just not good company. Ever notice how passengers in the Batmobile feel like they’re at the end of a bad date? …Read more

Dark Knight Producer One: Hey, I heard the Bloggy-Sphere already loves the movie!

Dark Knight Producer Two: Yeah, real critics dig it too!

Dark Knight Producer One: Holy crap we are amazing. I mean we are really great.

Dark Knight Producer Two: Do you think there is any way we can screw this up?

Dark Knight Producer One: I don’t know, but it sure would be fun to try!

Dark Knight Producer Two: I’ll call Comcast.

Dark Knight Producer One: I’ll call Domino’s.

So Warner Brothers is planning to work a “tribute” to the late Heath Ledger into their New York premiere of The Dark Knight next month. Reports OK! Mag (yeah, I know):

The studio behind the Batman Begins sequel is planning a tribute to the late actor at the New York City premiere and has been working closely with the Ledger family to make it come to fruition.

If all goes according to plan, Heath’s family will be flown in from Australia for the event and Michelle Williams, his ex and mother of their 2-year-old daughter Matilda, will walk the red carpet as well.

So: will this amount to a trashy trotting-out of a widow to ensure maximum tabloid coverage of a tentpole from a studio that could really use a big hit to justify their recent swerve away from producing smaller films? Or is it actually a classy way of explicitly acknowledging the obvious cloud that hangs over this wannabe blockbuster? I took an informal poll via Twitter, and responses leaned towards the latter, but do use the comments to tell us what you think.

Last week, I wondered when the presidential campaign and Warner Brothers’ campaign for The Dark Knight would merge. Today, the political and the movie promotional have become fully intertwined, although on a much more local scale than I had originally predicted.

According to the Village Voice (via Gothamist), Queens Councilman Hiram Monserrate is lobbying to officially brand New York City with the nickname Gotham City in time for The Dark Knight’s July release. Apparently, Monserrate thinks associating his city with a fictional flying crime fighter and a deranged, make-up wearing lunatic will be good for tourism. “I see that as a marketing tool,” he told the Voice. “‘Come visit the real Gotham City,’ taking advantage of this movie which will be one of those gate-breaking, record-selling movies like it always is.” He then mumbled something about how how Christopher Nolan’s Chicago-shot movie will help New York’s “art community to strengthen its reconnection to being a Gotham City,” and also something else about how frappuccinos embody the spirit of Batman.

Check out the full crazy at the link, and then tell us: if a studio were to, uh, make it worthwhile for a city official to sponsor a crackpot resolution involving one of their films, would that be bribery, or just really, really good viral marketing?

The New York Post has an image of one of two Joker action figures based on Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the villain in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. One version will come armed with a rocket launcher (!), the other with a plain old utilitarian knife. Mattel plans to release the toys in May.

You knew this blog post was coming when Warner Brothers issued a say-nothing statement hours after Heath Ledger’s body was found last week. Now, a little over a week later, the scraps of news and speculative think pieces are flooding in; I read them and put the relevant information in a bullet-point list so that you wouldn’t have to.

• Kim Masters at Slate says The Dark Knight hasn’t entered the ADR phase yet, meaning that if any of Ledger’s lines need re-recording, they’ll have to use a voice double. More interesting is the fact that Warner Brothers is spinning The Merchandising Issue as a moral one: if they don’t sell authorized t-shirts with Heath Ledger’s face on them, “The pirates would come out of the woodwork, and then it’s completely out of control.”
• Chris Thilk says the third party companies who planned to partner with Warner Brothers on tie-ins (including Hersheys, who are planning some kind of Batman chocolate bar) were mostly not planning on using Joker imagery anyway, and will be able to continue with their capitalization plans unabated.
• Borys Kit passes along word that WhySoSerious.com has been appended with a black ribbon. The creepy Joker images and Ledger soundbites otherwise remain intact.
• Meanwhile, at Reel Pop, Steve Bryant reports that the “Why So Serious?” poster featuring an image of Ledger, which will likely be taken out of print, is selling for upwards of $70 on eBay. “Does the fact that I desperately want one make me soulless and insensitive?”

More on Ledger, The Dark Knight, etc etc:

The Dark Knight trailer: Chris’ Review

Heath Ledger Joker Pics

Heath Ledger Found Dead

Joker Prequel: The Nontroversy (the prequel itself no longer exists on YouTube, but here are two posts about what it was like).

Daniel Day-Lewis on Heath Ledger

The NY Times and CNN are reporting that Heath Ledger was found dead this afternoon in a Soho apartment. According to this NY Times blog post, a housekeeper let a masseuse into the apartment for an appointment, and when they knocked on his bedroom door and there was no response, they went in and found him unconscious. Unnamed pills were allegedly found near the body.

Ledger, of course, was one of the Bob Dylans in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There; he also stars as the Joker in this summer’s eagerly anticipated Batman sequel, The Dark Knight. He recently split with Michelle Williams, with whom he had a child.

More details as they come in.

UPDATE: In the comments, Chris wonders if Ledger was finished shooting The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus with Terry Gilliam. According to this CBS story, filming was still in progress.

UPDATE 5:15 EST: The NY Times blog post linked above has been updated to say that Ledger was found in an apartment owned by Mary-Kate Olsen. Both STAR and TMZ are referring to the apartment as belonging to Ledger. Olsen has a high-profile cameo in The Wackness, which premiered this weekend to wildly mixed reviews at Sundance.

UPDATE 5:29 EST: NYT is now using the word “suicide.” TMZ apparently has a spy close to the scene who says the medical examiner is on the way. In their typically classy fashion, they’re running with the headline, “Ledger Death Bed Strewn With Pills.”

UPDATE 5:45 EST: TMZ is now reporting essentially the opposite of the NY Times. The AOL-owned gossip site says that Ledger, a recovering addict, accidentally overdosed in an apartment that “was not owned by Mary-Kate Olsen or related to her in any way.”

At the Guardian’s film blog, Sean Dodson erroneously paints WB’s release of the their six-minute Dark Knight prequel on IMAX prints of I Am Legend as an “accident”:

Holy bungled distribution Batman! The wrong trailer has been sent out! Or was it? Audiences in America who turned up to see an Imax preview of I am Legend this week have been treated to an apparent accidental taster of the forthcoming Batman movie, The Dark Knight, which is not due to arrive until July next year. Six minutes of the film were “accidentally” screened in Imax cinemas and the bootleg quickly leaked on to the internet.

Dodson doesn’t site any sources, so it’s hard to say why he reads this as “an accident”––beyond the fact that I guess he didn’t read this story, or this story, or this one, all of which indicate that Warner Brothers had made their intention to run the six minutes public as far back as October. But then, in a stunning feat of blog cliche, he cynically spins this non-accident as a devious conspiracy devised by evil marketing geniuses:

But although Warner pulled the bootleg preview from YouTube earlier today, you can’t help but wonder if this was accident or design…All those who saw it reported that the six minutes of raw action didn’t half leave them panting for more. The Joker couldn’t have planned it better.

So, to recap: Warner Brothers said they were going to show a six minute Joker short before I Am Legend. Then they showed a six minute Joker short before I Am Legend. When a camcorder bootleg of this footage ended up on YouTube, Warner Brothers had it removed, in an attempt to protect their copyright and further bolster ticket sales for I Am Legend. Then a blogger accused Warner Brothers of intentionally leaking the short but deviously making it look like an accident.

I get it now. This is why they hate us.

UPDATE: Sorry kids, the party’s over. As of 4:27 pm, this video “is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.” If you find it elsewhere online, let me know.

I doubt it’ll stay up through the day (you probably have about three hours before the work day begins in L.A. and someone at either WB or YouTube figures it out), but a camcorder bootleg of the Joker-centric Dark Knight prequel/preview/possible first six minutes of the movie that has been tacked on to IMAX screenings of I Am Legend is currently on YouTube. I meant to go see if for myself this weekend, but thanks to a snowstorm and general end-of-year madness, that just didn’t happen. As far as the bootleg goes, between the muffled sound and the dutch-angled, lap-eye view, I’ll have to watch it a couple of times through to fully get what’s going on, but doesn’t it sort of seem like one of the Joker’s doomed cronies is doing a Jack Nicholson impression? And if so–spoiler alert–then maybe the point of this preview is not, as Christopher Nolan previously stated, to tell the story of “The Rise of the Joker,” but to literally kill off our impression of the Joker as based on Nicholson’s performance in Tim Burton’s Batman?

I’m probably wrong. I’m sure you’ll tell me all about it.

Is it just me, or do these alleged Dark Knight publicity images look more like packaging shots for a $10 Joker Halloween costume than promo stills for a summer franchise film? Wait–is that the point? More at Aint it Cool, via WeSmirch.

Note: Variety.com appears to be down as of this writing, so we’re introducing a new “trade” today: The Guardian.

• George Lucas says he’s finally begun work on his long-rumored live-action Star Wars TV series. Lucas is adamant that the series will go beyond the tortured Skywalker clan to focus on peripheral characters from the film series, which doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem with the fans: at 6:30 on my local news this morning, this story was punctuated with a shot of the sun triumphantly rising over Manhattan set, to Darth Vader’s theme song. Production assistants at WNBC will apparently take whatever Star Wars extension they can get.
• From the “Yes, The Hollywood Executive Actually Said That” File: Steven Zeitchik of The Hollywood Reporter says Tyler Perry’s box office victory last weekend (his third in three years, after 2005’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman and 2006’s Madea’s Family Reunion) has “heartened the growing number of studios looking to crack the market for black films.” He quotes Sony Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper:”There’s probably not one new story to tell that hasn’t been told about white people. But there are so many stories that haven’t been told yet about people with brown and black faces.”
• Warner Brothers will tack a seven-minute Batman short in front of IMAX prints of the Will Smith vampire film I Am Legend. The short will cover the origin story of the Joker, to be played in Christopher Nolan’s next Batman flick by Heath Ledger.