Secrecy Cloaked 'Dark Knight'

In an era of instantaneous digital copying and widely available high-speed Internet access, the premature and unauthorized release of a movie to the public -- especially a coveted summer blockbuster -- can spell disaster. If the movie's a stinker, the word will travel at the speed of a mouse click, ruining chances of making back money. And if the movie's popular, piracy can rob ticket sales and cut into revenue.

No stopping 'Dark Knight' Photos: Box office top 10Executives at Warner Bros. knew they didn't have to worry about the first scenario: Buzz had been building for months about late actor Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker and director Christopher Nolan's dark rendition of the Batman legend. And marketing surveys pointed to a record-smashing opening weekend for “The Dark Knight" at the box office.

Instead, Warner Bros. was worried about what would happen if a copy of the movie slipped into public before the theatrical opening, which would result in it competing against pirated DVD copies. The ardent fan-boy appeal of “The Dark Knight" created opportunity and risk in equal measure for the studio.

The Batman sequel's core audience of superhero geeks is the same group of young men who gravitate to online file-sharing communities. Fear that pirated copies would pop up on the Internet during the film's crucial opening weekend prompted Warner to devote six months to an unprecedented anti-piracy strategy, painstakingly locking down the movie as it moved from production to post-production to movie theaters.

Warner created a “chain of custody" to track who had access to the film at any moment. It varied the shipping and delivery methods, staggering the delivery of film reels, so the entire movie wouldn't arrive at multiplexes in one shipment, in order to reduce risk of an entire copy being lost or stolen. It conducted spot checks of hundreds of theaters domestically and abroad, to ensure that illegal camcording wasn't taking place. It even handed out night-vision goggles to exhibitors in Australia, where the film opened two days before its U.S. launch, to scan the audience for the telltale infrared signal of a camcorder.

Warner Bros. executives said the extra vigilance paid off, helping to prevent camcorded copies of the reported $180-million film from reaching Internet file-sharing sites for about 38 hours. Although that doesn't sound like much progress, it was enough time to keep bootleg DVDs off the streets as the film racked up a record-breaking $158.4 million on opening weekend. The movie has now taken in more than $300 million.

The success of an anti-piracy campaign is measured in the number of hours it buys before the digital dam breaks. “One of the reasons why it's so important to try to protect the first weekend is that it prevents the pirate supply chain from starting," said Darcy Antonellis, president of Warner's distribution and technical operations. “A day or two becomes really, really significant. You've delayed disc manufacturing that then delays distribution, which then delays those discs from ending up on street corners for sale."