Dark Knight Jerkonomics

It got 94%/90% on rotten tomatoes, which astonishes me. Because The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie I saw when it opened last night, is a hot mess.

Sadly, the hype about Heath Ledger's performance was hardly overstated. I say sadly, because he seemed to have been bused in from a different, subtler, better movie. Maybe he was brought in as a guest of Michael Caine's Alfred, who appeared to be a live action character talking to a cartoon, a la Roger Rabbit, in his scenes with Christian Bale's Batman. Bale is one of my favorite actors, but he's badly miscast as the heavy-bodied, utterly unboyish Batman, and there's just nothing more to say about that.

There were three movies stuffed into this one. I don't understand why comic book superhero franchises (key word here being franchise) are so anxious to waste good material by cramming it all into one movie. Isn't the point of a franchise drawing it out across as many movies as possible to maximize your earning potential?

They fucked up Spiderman 3 that way, by cramming in Sandman, the New Goblin, and Venom all into the same movie, thereby not giving any of them enough space, and then killing all three of them off together so none of them would ever get enough space. Each of those villains could have carried a single movie by himself.

They did the same thing with X-Men: The Last Stand, by cramming way too many new mutant characters in.

I still don't understand the jerkonomics of making a bad movie that makes a lot of money vs. spending an extra $whatever on a good script doctor so they can make a good movie that makes a lot of money. After all, X-Men 2 and Spiderman 2 were both great movies of the same franchise as the lousy third films, and made about the same amount of money.

Or is there something I'm missing here?