• The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, January 24, 2008 1:30 PM

Warner Bros.' tantalizing Web marketing campaign for the next movie installment of "Batman" took an unexpected turn when Heath Ledger, the 28-year-old actor playing the Joker in "The Dark Knight," was found dead in a New York apartment Tuesday.

The campaign has been largely built around Ledger's Joker, even though Christian Bale returns as Batman. The Joker character became film legend in an earlier incarnation of the "Batman" series, when Jack Nicholson won praise for his deranged take on the villain. Ledger's eagerly anticipated portrayal is said to take the character to a darker level of violence and intensity.

The movie's current poster includes a ghostly and haunting image of Ledger in his Joker getup, with the tag line "Why So Serious?" scrawled in red. In recent interviews, Ledger said the Joker was the most-fun role he had ever undertaken, but was taxing physically and emotionally. A spokeswoman for Warner Bros. says the marketing campaign is continuing but declines to comment further.

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