Like I said, everyone makes fun of Avatar — and that started opening weekend (Dances with Wolves with blue people, Pocahontas knockoff, lame Papyrus font, etc.). Black Panther is overrated but no one claimed it broke the action film mold or anything as over the top as they said about TDK. La La Land had plenty of detractors. Titanic made a ton of money and was well reviewed but only teenage girls said it was the best movie ever. Titanic is actually a great comparison for TDK (although not as overrated).

But even as much as teenage girls loved Titanic, they weren't making the hyperbolic claims that TDK's fans were. Ledger's death ratcheted the hype to hysterical levels — people were saying that the Joker wasn't just the greatest villain ever, but literally the greatest acting performance ever. No one said stuff like that about Black Panther or Avatar.

After TDK worked people into a frothing frenzy of extravagant claims, critics who gave insufficiently glowing reviews of its sequel literally received death threats. People who had not seen Rises were so convinced of its greatness based in their hyped up opinion of TFK that anyone who disagreed deserved to live in fear of being killed for their opinion.

People were so outraged that TDK wasn't up for Best Picture that they changed the Oscars as a result. Is there another movie whose hype drove a change like that?

This article explains some of the hyperbolic reception of TDK:

Go ahead and scoff at the analogy, boomers, but one of the kids at the memorial service likened the opening of "Dark Knight" to the JFK assassination and the Challenger disaster as quintessential where-were-you defining moments of his generation.

That says much, about both this movie and the callowness of smart young men — the correct analogy is to "Titanic" or the final installment of "The Lord of the Rings" — but a pop event has always created its own sense of necessary immensity. "The Dark Knight" has to be the best movie of all time because it feels that way right now, and because it feels impossibly exhilarating to share that thrill with everyone you know and millions of people you don't.

Although hype played a critical part, this is less about hype than the gentle madness of crowds. The response to "Dark Knight" represents a perfect storm of studio publicity, public mourning, epic seriousness of filmmaking purpose, and the unspoken need for something in this crass tinsel culture to mean something. Without Ledger's performance — and more properly, without the tragedy of his accidental death lending a glow of belated triumph to that performance — I doubt the response to this movie would have been so impassioned.