There's a "posthumous mania" trend afoot at the moment ... and we don't just mean celebrities are passing away at a faster clip. This Is It, the documentary chronicling Michael Jackson's rehearsals for what would've been his comeback spectacle concerts in London, opened this week; Heath Ledger's final performance in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassas hits theaters Christmas Day; heck, even Michael Crichton will have a posthumous book released on Nov. 24.

Oftentimes such releases prove that a powerful creative force was gone too soon; other times, it's a quick cash grab that sullies the legacy of the artist in question.

 

THE 5 BEST

 

The Dark Knight


There was some grumbling about the "sympathy vote factor" when Heath Ledger won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but few recent cinematic characters have been as memorable - or as menacing - as Ledger's Joker. Sadly, he and Christian Bale's Batman won't do their dance "forever" as the film teases ... and no one will ever fill out a nurse's uniform quite the same way.

 

 

Enter the Dragon

 

Bruce Lee's greatest film actually hit theaters just six days after his accidental death on a movie set; it has since been deemed "culturally significant" and was inducted into the National Film Registry. Plus, few can step into a haunted house's hall of mirrors without reenacting part of Lee's final showdown with the villainous Han. Tragically, Lee's son Brandon's defining film, 1994's The Crow, was also a posthumous release.

 

 

Rebel Without a Cause

 

Released nearly a month after James Dean's fatal car crash, 1955's Rebel has become such a cultural touchstone in the ensuing decades, few people even realize Dean was dead and gone by the time it hit theaters. To this day, if you go out in public with a red jacket, a white T-shirt and a pompadour, chances are you're gonna get called Jim Stark. Just don't get teased into any games of chicken.

 

 

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner


This groundbreaking tale of interracial marriage was touching on multiple levels in 1967, the greatest being that it captured the final performance of the legendary Spencer Tracy, who died just 17 days after filming was completed. Tracy was in poor health even before filming began, and insurance companies refused to cover him, but he soldiered on. And those tears that longtime Tracy hook-up Katharine Hepburn leaks during his final speech? The real deal.

 

 

Transformers: The Movie

 

Most people would find it depressing that the man who made the undisputed masterpiece Citizen Kane at age 25 would close out his career voicing a giant robot planet that eats other planets. But those people would be wrong. Does 1986's animated Transformers: The Movie amount to a 90-minute toy commercial? Yes. Did Welles himself describe what would be his final role as "toy doing terrible things to each other"? Yes. But you'll be hard-pressed to find a child of the '80s who didn't think Unicron was a completely terrifying presence.

 

Click the Page 2 link below for the 5 Worst Posthumous Film Releases...it's depressing.