The story, without spoilers
A year or so into his war on crime, Batman is winning. Gotham's mob is rattled, Lieutenant Jim Gordon has an ally he can trust, and the new district attorney, Harvey Dent, is a public hero who might make a masked vigilante unnecessary. Bruce Wayne quietly hopes so; it would let him have a life, perhaps with Rachel Dawes.
Then a man in smeared make-up who calls himself the Joker starts making offers to the city's criminals, and his plans have nothing to do with money. Each move seems designed to force Batman, Gordon and Dent into choices with no clean answer, and the film becomes less a superhero chase than a test of how much a city's best people can bear.
Behind the scenes
Christopher Nolan shot the film from April to November 2007 in Chicago, which plays Gotham, in Hong Kong and on sets in England, with a $185 million budget. He wanted around 40 minutes in IMAX, the high-resolution 70 mm format then used mostly for documentaries. The finished film contains roughly 15 to 20 per cent IMAX footage and the film was the first major motion picture to use IMAX cameras for any of its footage.
Editing was under way in January 2008 when Heath Ledger died, aged 28, of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs. The film carries a dedication to him and to stuntman Conway Wickliffe, who died during rehearsals for a Tumbler stunt.
Warner Bros. made a sequel a priority after Batman Begins revived the series. Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer developed the story, putting Harvey Dent at its centre as the man caught between Batman and the Joker, and the Nolan brothers wrote the screenplay with 1980s Batman comics and crime dramas in mind. Filming ran from April to November 2007 in Chicago and Hong Kong and on sets in England, and Nolan insisted on practical stunts wherever possible, including flipping an 18-wheel truck and blowing up a real factory.
Why it still matters
The Dark Knight was the moment the superhero film was treated as serious drama. Critics praised its mature tone, visual style and performances, above all Ledger's, and he won the Oscar, the BAFTA and the Golden Globe after his death. Its first run took $997 million worldwide, and re-releases later carried it past $1 billion.
It also left a mark on the Oscars themselves. The film was widely expected to be a Best Picture nominee and was not, and Warner Bros. had relaunched it in 300 cinemas in January 2009 to raise its profile during nominations. The backlash was strong enough that for the 2010 ceremony the Academy raised the limit on Best Picture nominees from five to ten, a change still nicknamed “The Dark Knight Rule”. Few films have changed the rules of the awards that overlooked them.
Ledger died of an accidental prescription drug overdose in January 2008, months before release, and the attention around his performance was intense. His posthumous Academy, BAFTA and Golden Globe awards made The Dark Knight the first comic-book film to win major acting awards.
Critics have called it a blueprint for modern superhero cinema, because it played as a crime film that happened to feature comic-book characters, and many later films copied its grit with mixed results. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2020, and Nolan closed the trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises in 2012.