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 nom­i­na­tions for the golden globes were announced today, and as usual are being mea­sured as a pre-cursor to the pos­si­ble nom­i­na­tions for the Oscars.

Heath Ledger has picked up a nom­i­na­tion for the best sup­port­ing actor for his role as the joker, a very strong indi­ca­tion that he may be in the run­ning for the same honor at the upcom­ing acad­emy awards.

More shortly as I am post­ing this from a mov­ing train on an iPhone.

Christo­pher Nolan has been speak­ing with USA Today about the suc­cess of The Dark Knight and its poten­tial sequel:

Nolan says he is jot­ting notes and doing some rough out­lines for a third story, but he hasn’t yet found any­thing he’s will­ing to com­mit to film, despite Warner Bros.’ eager­ness to get a new film underway.

“It was obvi­ous when the box office was so big ($530 mil­lion domes­ti­cally) that we had under­es­ti­mated how ready fans were to reboot the fran­chise,” he says. “The worst thing you could do now that you’ve got­ten the plane back in the air is mess up the landing.”

[Talk­ing about sequels and a third movie] “I don’t know why they’re hard to do,” Nolan says. “Maybe there’s so much expec­ta­tion to them. But I wouldn’t want to do one if it weren’t going to be as good as the first or sec­ond. That’s not respect­ful to the fans.“

Nolan also points out his rea­sons for not putting out­takes or deleted scenes on the DVD — not a sin­gle extra scene involv­ing The Joker:

Nolan says he wasn’t keep­ing deleted scenes from fans. “For my past three films, I really haven’t had scenes that didn’t make it in the movie,” he says. “If it’s in the final script, I tend put it on screen.”

Any out­takes, how­ever, were inten­tion­ally left off the DVD. “I don’t like out­takes or gag reels,” Nolan says. “I don’t think it’s respect­ful to the actors, who signed on to have their per­for­mance on screen, not the takes that didn’t work out. It dis­cour­ages actors from going all-out if they think every mis­take is going on the disc.”

This report comes from All Things Fan Girl via AICN and details the main points from the talk, cov­er­ing the Blu ray, BD-Live, a live Chris Nolan com­men­tary on Dec 18th, the con­tin­u­a­tion of the Bat­man story (e.g. the third movie), lack of a direc­tors cut and shoot­ing an entire movie in IMAX, with workarounds for the nois­i­ness of the camera.

This is a very good read..

Went to the Dark Knight Blu Ray release event with Chris Nolan last night.

Before tonight I had never even HEARD of BD Live. Appar­ently it’s Xbox Live for Blu-Ray? If you have a BD Live enabled Blu Ray player or a PS3, then you can con­nect to the inter­net and par­take in the poten­tial awe­some­ness. The Dark Knight is Warner Broth­ers’ first foray into this for­mat and it’s shap­ing up to be rea­son alone to invest in a Blu-Ray Player.

First of all, it comes with tons of con­tent, wait­ing to be streamed for free– the newest Warner’s trail­ers, episodes of Warner Pre­mière Motion Comics (Mad Love! Shadow of Ra’s al Ghul!) and more. And because every­thing is stream­ing, you can get to the con­tent faster and it doesn’t take up any hard drive space. One of my favorite fea­tures of TDK BD Live is the com­men­tary option. With a com­puter & web­cam, you can record YOURSELF giv­ing com­men­tary for the whole movie or just a scene here, a scene there. Then, when peo­ple go on BD Live, they can select your com­men­tary to watch with the film. Now, it’s doubt­ful that I would ever watch a stranger’s com­men­tary, but a friend’s? Cer­tainly. Maybe even some­one famous? A blog­ger, a writer, a direc­tor, an actor, a critic, a tech­ni­cian — peo­ple not involved with the film who would have no busi­ness doing com­men­tary for the dvd, but would have an inter­est­ing per­spec­tive, mak­ing their thoughts avail­able to the gen­eral pub­lic? Yes, I’m into that.

Read the rest of this entry »

The nom­i­na­tions list for the 51st Grammy Awards have been announced and Hans Zimmer/James New­ton Howard’s Dark Knight sound­track is included in them:

Best Score Sound­track Album For Motion Pic­ture, Tele­vi­sion Or Other Visual Media
(Award to Composer(s) for an orig­i­nal score cre­ated specif­i­cally for, or as a com­pan­ion to, a cur­rent legit­i­mate motion pic­ture, tele­vi­sion show or series or other visual media.)

* The Dark Knight
James New­ton Howard & Hans Zim­mer, com­posers
[Warner Sunset/Warner Bros.]

* Indi­ana Jones And The King­dom Of The Crys­tal Skull
John Williams, com­poser
[Con­cord Records]

* Iron Man
Ramin Djawadi, com­poser
[Lionsgate]

* There Will Be Blood
Jonny Green­wood, com­poser
[None­such Records]

* Wall-E
Thomas New­man, com­poser
[Walt Dis­ney Records/Pixar]

The cin­e­matic re-release of The Dark Knight to coin­cide with the Oscars is going to take place on Jan­u­ary 23rd, report Vari­ety.

Warner Bros. will re-release “The Dark Knight” on Jan. 23 in a nation­wide launch, guar­an­tee­ing that it will become the fourth film to take in more than $1 bil­lion in world­wide box office.

“Knight” has cumed $530.3 mil­lion domes­ti­cally and $465.9 mil­lion inter­na­tion­ally, leav­ing it less than $4 mil­lion short of the billion-dollar mile­stone. Only “Titanic,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” have topped that mark.

“Knight” also is the second-highest domes­tic grosser of all time, trail­ing only “Titanic.”

The re-release will come six weeks after the DVD launch of “Knight,” set for Tuesday.

Dan Fell­man, pres­i­dent of Warner’s domes­tic dis­tri­b­u­tion, made the announce­ment Thurs­day. “We wanted to pro­vide one more oppor­tu­nity for movie­go­ers to expe­ri­ence it on the bigscreen as it was meant to be seen,” he added.

Thanks jetxj9!

Nick wrote in with this excel­lent piece of Fan art show­ing an (old) Oscar poster clev­erly defaced by the Joker, cre­ated by joshmc at the Fan Art Exhibit.

Warner Broth­ers have launched a Dark Knight ‘For Your Con­sid­er­a­tion’ web­site as we approach the awards sea­son. The site also fea­tures a free down­load of the Dark Knight screen­play and a list of upcom­ing screenings.

In other news, the mayor of Bat­man, a small town in Turkey, is look­ing to sue the film mak­ers for using the name of their town with­out per­mis­sion. Shouldn’t mat­ter really, con­sid­er­ing The Dark Knight is cur­rently sit­ting at almost $997m world­wide, and about to step into the mem­bers only bil­lion dol­lar club.

(Also, did you know, appar­ently The Dark Knight has bro­ken some records! Maybe even the one for blu-ray sales!)