Even before shooting had wrapped on The Dark Knight last year, the movie already seemed destined to become the defining film of the 2008 summer season. Anticipation was building for director Christopher Nolan's sequel to his well-received Batman Begins, which had salvaged the durable Batman saga from the pop-culture junkyard of passé camp and made Gotham City hip and menacing.

Then the tragic death of Heath Ledger in January ramped up public curiosity about the actor's performance as the villainous Joker. And the early, rapturous reviews of The Dark Knight that have surfaced on the Internet over the past two weeks have amplified the movie's pre-release buzz into a loud roar.

When The Dark Knight finally opens at 12:01 a.m. Friday, it stands an excellent chance of dethroning Spider-Man as the highest-grossing comic-book movie of all time. But even if it comes up short, the movie will have accomplished something else: marking a definitive turning point in the rapidly growing genre of comic-book superhero movies.

Although many films based on graphic novels have proven the literary and intellectual possibility of the genre (A History of Violence, The Road to Perdition, 300), superhero movies still tend to trade in visceral thrills and high-flying adventure. Even in sophisticated films such as the X-Men and Spider-Man trilogies, metaphors on everything from the pain of adolescence to the perils of racism and prejudice were relegated to the deep background, never to get in the way of the popcorn thrills.

But The Dark Knight, which really is as dark as its title implies, feels different: Here is a superhero film in which the hero is not always able to rush in and save the day, where a pasty-faced anarchist threatens to blow up a hospital -- and succeeds, and where death and danger do more than just threaten major characters.

It is the adult tone of The Dark Knight -- arguably the first comic-book movie whose PG-13 rating should be taken seriously -- that is likely to fuel its popularity at the box office.

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''Popular culture is doing things today that are much more ambitious from a storytelling and thematic standpoint than they were doing a century ago,'' says Robert Thompson, professor of pop culture at Syracuse University. ``Comic books have been moving into much more literary territory for a while now, because the superhero genre is a good one to enact an immediate response to changes in a culture's zeitgeist.

''And so you now have an entire generation of filmmakers who have never struggled with the idea of the superhero genre taking on serious themes,'' Thompson says. ``They've just assumed it from the very beginning. They've grown up with the idea that a comic can be as serious as a novel or a symphony. Superhero movies have been a huge beneficiary of that.''

The plot of The Dark Knight may sound like business as usual: Billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and his alter-ego Batman team up with the police commissioner (Gary Oldman) to take down a gaudy, flashy troublemaker who wears face paint, calls himself the Joker and is wreaking havoc in Gotham City.

But the gravity with which director Nolan approaches this familiar scenario is a noticeable departure from traditional superhero movies, which accentuate the fantastical elements of their stories via gee-whiz special effects and a prevailing tone of ''Isn't this fun?'' Even more than Batman Begins, which already displayed an uncommonly somber tone, The Dark Knight often feels like a straightforward crime-drama -- one peppered with occasional appearances by men in outlandish costumes.

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