Set within a year after the events of Batman Begins (2005), Batman, Lieutenant James Gordon, and new District Attorney Harvey Dent successfully begin to round up the criminals that plague Gotham City, until a mysterious and sadistic criminal mastermind known only as 'The Joker' appears in Gotham, creating a new wave of chaos. Batman's struggle against The Joker becomes deeply personal, forcing him to 'confront everything he believes' and improve his technology to stop him. A love triangle develops between Bruce Wayne, Dent, and Rachel Dawes.
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Aaron Eckhart wasn't a lock for Harvey Dent - Liev Schreiber, Josh Lucas and Ryan Phillippe had all shown interest, and Mark Ruffalo actually auditioned for the part. Nolan ended up going with Eckhart after being impressed by his performance in Thank You for Smoking.
When Katie Holmes decided not to return for the sequel, the studio considered Sarah Michelle Gellar, Isla Fisher, Emily Blunt and Rachel McAdams before Maggie Gyllenhaal ended up taking over the role of Rachel Dawes.
During production the crew used the working title Rory's First Kiss to throw people off the scent. It wasn't a random phrase - Rory is the name of Christopher Nolan's son.
For all its box office dominance, this is actually the first Batman feature film where the word 'Batman' doesn't appear anywhere in the title itself.
Composers Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard made a conscious choice to use Batman's heroic musical theme only twice across the whole film. Their reasoning was that a hummable heroic tune would undercut the darker, messier version of the character they were going for, so hearing it sparingly turns it into what Zimmer called a kind of musical foreshadowing.
The film pulled in over $158 million in its opening weekend, breaking the record that Spider-Man 3 had only just set the previous summer.
To find the Joker, Heath Ledger holed up alone in a hotel room and then his own apartment for roughly a month before filming began. He later described it to Empire as reading every relevant comic he could find, then just sitting and meditating on the character until a voice and a laugh started to emerge.
Ledger kept a small diary while getting into character, and one figure kept turning up throughout its pages: Alex DeLarge, Malcolm McDowell's character from A Clockwork Orange. He even practiced replicating McDowell's unnerving 'Kubrick stare' as part of building the Joker's presence.
Among the clippings and photos in Ledger's preparation diary was an image of a hyena, which people who've seen the documentary footage believe was one of the inspirations behind the Joker's cackling, unhinged laugh in the finished film.
Alongside the comic books and A Clockwork Orange stills, reports on Ledger's preparation say he also drew on the chaotic energy of the Sex Pistols while building his version of the character.
