Hans Zim­mer and James New­ton Howard were recently fea­tured on KCRW’s “Morn­ing Becomes Eclec­tic”; on their web­site you can lis­ten to the inter­view and excerpts of the sound­track or read the transcript.

Zim­mer explains that each of the char­ac­ters were so dis­tinct, clearly defined and pow­er­ful that each could have musi­cal iden­ti­ties that were very sep­a­rate. In fact, the col­lab­o­ra­tors often split the work — New­ton tack­led the music for Har­vey Dent, played by Aaron Eck­hart, while Zim­mer cre­ated the Joker’s theme.

“I kept churn­ing around…how do you describe anar­chy, how do you describe a vil­lian and not do it in a way that’s been done before? One of the things I got very much from the char­ac­ter was a fear­less­ness, and an even­ness in a way. The Joker is the only per­son you can trust in the movie. The Joker is the only one who will never lie to you because he is con­sis­tent about his phi­los­o­phy,” said Zimmer.

“I really wanted to do the whole thing just with one note. I had this idea that rather than what a note is in the con­text of the notes sur­round­ing it, what could I do emo­tion­ally through a per­for­mance within one note? How much can I stretch the mean­ing of a sin­gle note and get it down to such min­i­mal­ism. I failed slightly. I had to use two notes in the end.”

Thanks Rachel!

Can’t say we didn’t see this one com­ing. Nikki Finke has the scoop on the sales numbers,

I just heard that Warner Bros’ Bat­man Blu-ray discs alone sold 600,000 copies on Tues­day, the first day of release. By con­trast, Marvel/Paramount’s Iron Man sold 250,000 Blu-ray discs when it pre­miered on Sep­tem­ber 30th and ended up sell­ing 400,000 Blu-ray units in its first week. But wait til you see what The Dark Knight sold in both for­mats, stan­dard def and hi-def: 3 mil­lion copies bought by cus­tomers in the U.S., Canada and the UK on its first day in stores. That’s 3x the norm.

Reuters have the lat­est update on the DVD and Blu-ray sales, stat­ing that more than 10 mil­lion units have been shifted:

Sales of the DVD, star­ring Chris­t­ian Bale as Bat­man and the late Heath Ledger as the vil­lain­ous Joker, totaled more than 10 mil­lion units world­wide since its Decem­ber 9 release and are expected to remain strong through­out the hol­i­day sea­son, Time Warner Inc’s Warner Bros movie stu­dio said. Ten mil­lion units trans­late into an esti­mated $175 mil­lion in rev­enues, accord­ing to Home Media Mag­a­zine Mar­ket Research.

The best sell­ing DVD of all time is “Find­ing Nemo” with over 60m units sold.

In a turn­around it appears that the James New­ton Howard/Hans Zim­mer sound­track is once again eli­gi­ble for an Acad­emy Award nom­i­na­tion. It had pre­vi­ously been ruled out (Nov 10th) because 5 com­posers were named on the cue sheet; which was deemed to be too many. In response the ‘affected par­ties’ sub­mit­ted infor­ma­tion to the con­trary, lead­ing The Music Branch Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee to con­clude that Zim­mer and Howard had author­ship of the score, putting the music back in con­tention for an Oscar.

Source: Vari­ety

The exclu­sive Dark Knight Blu-ray and DVD pack­ages are com­ing in many many dif­fer­ent fla­vors; some with free Bat­man mask (see Tar­get), some with a Joker or Bat­man mask stat­uette (see Best Buy), some with a minia­ture Bat pod (see Ama­zon) and some in a steel case. All of them can be grabbed from Ebay, for the obses­sive col­lec­tor in you.

Ama­zon

Dark Knight Blu-ray | DVD | Spe­cial Edi­tion Blu-ray with Bat-pod

(See our orig­i­nal Dark Knight DVD and Blu ray post for details)

Exclu­sives on Ebay

Tar­get

Best Buy

A 2 CD spe­cial edi­tion of the Hans Zim­mer and James New­ton Howard sound­track fea­tur­ing bonus remixes and new tracks will be released on Decem­ber 9th.

From the press release,

‘The Dark Knight: Orig­i­nal Motion Pic­ture Sound­track’ returns with the ASCAP-winning com­posers from Bat­man Begins– Hans Zim­mer and James New­ton Howard for a pow­er­ful orches­tral score. The Spe­cial Edi­tion fea­tures the com­plete score on two CD’s plus four bonus remix tracks; it also con­tains an 8x8x40 page hard­bound book.

Disc: 1
1. Why So Seri­ous?
2. I’m Not A Hero
3. Har­vey Two-Face
4. Aggres­sive Expan­sion
5. Always A Catch
6. Blood On My Hands
7. A Lit­tle Push
8. Like A Dog Chas­ing Cars
9. I Am The Bat­man
10. And I Thought My Jokes Were Bad
11. Agent Of Chaos
12. Intro­duce A Lit­tle Anar­chy
13. Watch The World Burn
14. A Dark Knight

Disc: 2
1. Bank Rob­bery (Pro­logue)
2. Buyer Beware
3. Halfway To Hong Kong
4. Decent Men In An Inde­cent Time
5. You’re Gonna Love Me
6. Chance
7. You Com­plete Me
8. The Fer­ries
9. We Are Tonight’s Enter­tain­ment
10. A Watch­ful Guardian
11. Why So Serious?(The Crys­tal Method Remix)
12. Poor Choice Of Words(Paul van Dyk Remix)
13. Gun­pow­der And Gasoline(Remix by Mel Wes­son)
14. Rory’s First Kiss(Remix by Rye­land Allison)

Buy the Dark Knight 2 Disc Spe­cial Edi­tion Sound­track from Ama­zon | Offi­cial Score Website

Warner Bros has finally offi­cially announced that the release date for the Dark Knight on DVD and Blu-ray will be Decem­ber 9th.  Check out the cov­ers for these and the spe­cial 2-Disc Lim­ited Edi­tion set.

/Film have posted what look like the first details about the spe­cial releases and lim­ited edi­tion ver­sions of The Dark Knight that will be avail­able when it comes out to own later this year. HOWEVER — they were sent in by a reader and could be com­plete fabrications.

None of this pro­mo­tion plays on the pop­u­lar­ity of The Joker which leaves me a lit­tle suspect.

2-Disc Bat­Pod Collector’s Edition

2-Disc Bat-Mask Edi­tion (this one has to be fake)

DVD and Blu ray covers

French Con­nec­tion have ranged 7 styl­ish new Dark Knight/Joker related t-shirts, I par­tic­u­larly like the first one, except that fad­dish “faded t-shirt” look that seems to be in at the moment. If I order it now it might arrive in time for the IMAX screen­ings in Lon­don next thurs­day (any other Brits going to that?)

Thanks JP Gainey