His loved ones are crying.
The media is high.
His company has a headache.
The death of Heath Ledger.
It triggered a round of media frenzy and posed a dilemma for his company, Warner Brothers, a unit of Time Warner Inc. (TWX). The viral marketing campaign of Ledger's last film, The Dark Knight, began nine months ago, according to The Wall Street Journal. Fans on the loop have been viewing the trailer, posters and teaser materials for months.
The Dark Knight, part of the Batman franchise, is due for release in July 2008. The website, IBelieveinHarveyDent, is a mock website endorsing a fictional character to run for District Attorney in the fictional city of Gotham. A spin-off called IBelieveinHarveyDentToo was supposed to be an edit by the Joker, the arch-nemesis of Batman, played by Ledger. As of Saturday afternoon the second website no longer exists, but the first is still running.
Perhaps Warner Brothers removed the site out of respect for the dead or because of corporate concerns. Perhaps the server is simply down. In any case, there is little grounds for suspecting Warner Brothers of exploitation.
The Dark Knight had an estimated budget of 150 million dollars. Batman Begins, the prequel, grossed 205 million dollars in five months, in the U.S. alone (figures from Internet Movie Database). Christian Bale's Batman basically sold that film. Warner Brothers had planned to sell the new one with The Joker.
As one industry analyst told AFP, The Dark Knight is not some obscure arthouse film but one of the top Hollywood properties, a franchise grossing 1.6 billion dollars worldwide in the first five films.
All that had rested upon Ledger's shoulder as the red-mouthed, heavily-made up, grinning villain, for the last few months. Some think his face should be removed from posters, others think that his death would add a morbid fascination to the film (like Brandon Lee in The Crow).
Huffington Post columnist Star Jones fiercely criticized the ruthless media orgy and expressed a most empathetic point of view: When someone dies, be sensitive to their loved ones.
Why is this not happening? It's the media cycle that compulsively feeds us bad news about the famous until we are all fed up. And then does it again.
Actors and rock stars who die at their peak don't benefit from the surge of fame that inevitably follows their deaths. Kurt Cobain and James Dean's legacies are still bankrolling some people's accounts. Perhaps no one is really a good judge of who's right or wrong. It's not even important. The person is dead, and all the world can't bring him back.
Disclosure: Heath Ledger is one of my favorite actors, and Brokeback Mountain one of my favorite films, but I do not own any part of Time Warner.
Photo:Howie_Berlin, Creative Commons, Flickr