Social media as a PR tool is at work again, but the power of social media can work against the public. While the power of social media means the public can voice their opinion, it also means that the opinion of one public can be commented on by another public’s opinion. For example, a CNN article reported that a group of fans are adamant about having Heath Ledger as the last actor who will ever portray the Joker in the Batman film franchise. The comments under the article indicated that retiring Batman’s main arch nemesis was unreasonable: “This is idiotic! Heath Ledger turned in a great performance as The Joker, but to say his death means the character should be "retired" is preposterous.”
One comment seemed to agree with the petition: “Difficult to achieve the quality, mannerisms, sadistic psychotic state that Ledger's performance obtained in this movie. He is "the soul" of the movie; and his tragic death immortalized him as the best "Joker" of all movies.”
The entertainment blog, Iwatchstuff.com, picked up the story and actually made fun of the online petition, which has 2, 431 signatures. The blogger’s commentary included, “2,431 supporters? That's nothing. That's like a reasonably-sized high school supporting it. The Joker petition probably has the same number of votes as the student council petition for the lunchroom to serve pizza twice a week.”
In addition, the users who read the post left comments to mostly agree with the blogger’s comments. Once comment said, “…petitioning for the character of the Joker to be taken out any future batman movies is ridiculous. You CANNOT have Batman without the Joker, you just can't. Joker is a main villain, the most important villain who Batman\Bruce doesn’t understand.” The same commenter further argued that Warner Bros. will not pay attention to the petition anyway. The commenter wrote:
I don't even think Ledger himself would want his fans or simply fans of the comic books and movie franchise to be doing this. And lastly, Warner Bros isn't going to do anything about it. They didn’t even care about fans when they pushed Harry Potter back nine months.
It seems that the public wants to have a say on everything, and web 2.0 encourages it. Though there is an online petition which wants one thing, the public reaction is largely negative. If Warner Bros pays attention to the free information at their disposal, they will determine that the larger consensus is that the Joker character should continue to appear in the Batman movies.