Christo­pher Nolan has stated an inter­est in the exten­sive and elab­o­rate 70 year his­tory of Bat­man — par­tic­u­larly the inter­est­ing parts that have not yet been in the movies or the six­ties tele­vi­sion show.

Mean­while, The Rid­dler, The Pen­guin and Cat­woman are all vil­lains that have been bandied about as poten­tials for the next movie; I per­son­ally doubt whether we will see these char­ac­ters pop up in the next fea­ture. Instead I think we will see Nolan opt for a vil­lain that impacts more on Batman/Bruce Wayne’s pro­file. As seen so dev­as­tat­ingly with The Joker, when the vil­lain really messes with the Hero in every which way, the sto­ries become much more inter­twined, com­plex and exciting.

So — on that note:

Which villain(s) do you want to see in Bat­man 3?

The less obvi­ous, the bet­ter — feel free to include your cast­ing wishlists.

Sadly our caped cru­sader lost the top spot to The Mummy this Fri­day; tak­ing $12.7m ver­sus Bren­dan Fraser’s $15.3m. How­ever, com­ing back to the fore­font on Sat­ur­day — Bat­man returned to the top with a take of $17.4m against Tomb of the Dragon Emperor’s $14.7m.

The week­end fig­ures added another $43.8m to the TDK total and touch­ing dis­tance of the cov­eted $400m record. The Mummy made $42.4m, a close sec­ond, but a poor open­ing week­end for the movie.

Talk­ing with MTV, David Goyer says that he already “knows the theme” for the third Bat­man movie, although he also reit­er­ates that a third movie is not set in stone and it could “go either way”.

“I think that’s the scari­est thing – to think, could we come up with a third movie that was as good as the first two? Can we top our­selves?” screen­writer David Goyer asked aloud, almost rhetor­i­cally, in a recent con­ver­sa­tion with MTV News. “Doing it a third time would be a big proposition.”

Make no mis­take about it, though, a third film HAS been dis­cussed, Goyer con­fessed, reveal­ing that, while noth­ing is con­crete, both a vil­lain and a theme have been bandied about.

“We’ve only talked loosely about it, though, Chris and I,” Goyer said.

Inter­est­ingly, it’s the theme, and not the vil­lain, that most inter­ests me, espe­cially given how the lat­ter seems inex­orably tied to the for­mer in this new mod­ern Bat­man uni­verse. (Fear the pre­dom­i­nant issue in “Begins” pre­cip­i­tat­ing the intro­duc­tion of Scare­crow, esca­la­tion in “Knight” sim­i­larly call­ing for The Joker.

The fact that Goyer has a theme he wants to keep in mind for a pos­si­ble “Bat­man 3” means he also has a direc­tion, a cri­sis, and, yes, a villain.

So what is it?

“I have one,” Goyer said laugh­ing. “But I’m not going to tell you. Chris is very par­tic­u­lar about that.

“I do think, though, that if there’s not a third film – these two movies stand on their own,” he added. “I think it could go either way.”

/Film have also spo­ken with Chris­t­ian Bale and Christo­pher Nolan about Bat­man 3 — every­thing is still up in the air:

Nolan: “I don’t know what I’d do next, or what would hap­pen next. I felt in doing a sequel that it would be a big mis­take to try to hold any­thing back for future films. You have to put every­thing you can into this movie and try and make it as great as it can be.”

Chris­t­ian Bale: “I always like to have to think when I’m leav­ing the the­ater. I do love any movie that leaves me ques­tion­ing what has hap­pened, what is going to hap­pen. I see that in fin­ish­ing the movie I want to know what will hap­pen, what is going to hap­pen. But it is com­pletely in the hands of Chris, weather he decides to do that or not. It will be a lot of money that he didn’t give you any indi­ca­tion if that was going to hap­pen or not? But it’s com­pletely his deci­sion. I can’t imag­ine doing this with­out Chris. I don’t even want to con­sider that because he’s cre­ated this. This is his.”

And in an older EW arti­cle, Bale says some­thing similar:

Inter­viewer: So do you think there will be a part 3 of Bat­man?
Chris­t­ian Bale: Um, look, let’s wait and see…

Inter­viewer: Or, I guess it’d be part 6.
Chris­t­ian Bale: No, no, no, no, no. [Smil­ing] Part 3 is what I’d con­sider it, yeah, I don’t say part 6. Bat­man begins — that was the begin­ning there, with all due respect to the oth­ers. We are re-creating this. You know, obvi­ously the deci­sion is out of my hands. I would, know­ing the Dark Knight story, I would like very much to com­plete a tril­ogy. And I think that know­ing the story of The Dark Knight, it leaves you antic­i­pat­ing some­thing that really can get very, very inter­est­ing for a third. Now, the ques­tion would be: Is Chris going to be doing it? Because to me I find it tricky to imag­ine work­ing on it with­out it being a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Chris.

Thanks BatGirl567!

Now that The Dark Knight has been out for over three week­ends, I will begin to splat­ter more spoiler-ish infor­ma­tion into posts as we begin to dis­cuss “Bat­man 3″, or what­ever name we can derive for the next film.

Christo­pher Nolan hasn’t yet signed on for a third Bat­man movie, and his screen­writer John Nolan is still on the set of Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion. Until the key play­ers sign-on, includ­ing David Goyer, ANY cast­ing rumors that you see are most likely wish­lists or arti­cles look­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on The Dark Knight’s popularity.

Tak­ing this point into con­sid­er­a­tion, I now present you the three main rum­blings that are spread­ing across the internet:

Angelina Jolia as Catwoman

This rumor seems to have orig­i­nated from an NY Daily News arti­cle which reck­ons that Angelina Jolie should play Cat­woman in the next Bat­man incar­na­tion — or so for­mer Cat­woman and ‘Bat­man icon’ Julie New­mar thinks.

“Angelina would own the part. My indus­try friends tell me [she] has made inquiries about the role. I can under­stand how it would piqué her inter­est. Cat­woman is Batman’s one true love. She’s tremen­dously pop­u­lar with women because she’s both a hero­ine and a vil­lain­ess. When you look at the stag­ger­ing box office of this cur­rent film, which actress wouldn’t want to jump in?”

Although this goes against Nolan and Goyer’s incli­na­tion NOT to bring back the humanoid feline.

Johnny Depp as The Riddler

Mean­while, the supri­ous and ter­ri­ble National Enquirer, via Jake and Hol​ly​wood​.com are tip­ping Johnny Depp to play The Rid­dler. That’s the extent of the news feature.

“(Pro­duc­ers) are con­vinced that the role of the Rid­dler is per­fect for Depp. Johnny’s a pro. He’ll be able to take direc­tion from direc­tor Chris Nolan and still make the char­ac­ter his own.”

(SPOILER: I’ve also read rumors that Depp would be a good sub­sti­tute for The Joker should they wish to bring him back in some capacity.)

Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man as The Penguin

The tabloid also thinks:

“And what bet­ter Pen­guin is there than Philip Sey­mour Hoffman.”

I can guar­an­tee that come 12 months, none of these pre­dic­tions will be close. Fan reac­tions to these rumors are also entirely incon­se­quen­tial — we all remem­ber how masses reacted when Heath Ledger was cast as The Joker.

This week­end looked like it would bring in more big num­bers for The Dark Knight, and that it cer­tainly did. After very strong mid-week sales of $18.4m and $16.5m on Wednes­day and Thurs­day respec­tively, the caped cru­sader added another $23.2m on Fri­day, mak­ing the $300m tar­get reach­able by the end of the week.

In its sec­ond week­end The Dark Knight grossed an esti­mated $75.6m in 4366 the­aters, the record for biggest sec­ond week­end ever (set by Shrek 2 — $72.2m), putting Bat­man at a whop­ping $314.2m after only 10 days — smash­ing the pre­vi­ous $300m record set by Dead Man’s Chest by 6 days.

The movie is now up to #23 on the domes­tic block­buster chart. Inter­na­tion­ally The Dark Knight added $65.6m in 7,143 the­aters across 43 loca­tions — reach­ing a for­eign total of $126.3m. In 12 days the world­wide gross has reached $440.5m, despite key Asian and Euro­pean mar­kets get­ting a delayed release in August.

Sources: Vari­ety, Box Office Mojo

Dur­ing the viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign we were given this image of The Joker being chauffeured:

Chris has pointed out that this was not in the movie — maybe there are some more Joker scenes wait­ing for us on the DVD release, or a director’s cut? We can only hope. Where do you thing this would have fit into the movie?

Read the rest of this entry »

The Dark Knight has utterly smashed the record for reach­ing $200m the fastest, the pre­vi­ous record was eight days — by three films — Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Spider-Man 2 and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith; all big name con­tenders. The Dark Knight has achieved this in five days, knock­ing a whole 3 days off the record. That’s phenomenal.

On Mon­day the movie took $24.5 mil­lion (a best ever non-holiday Mon­day) and Tues­day it added a fur­ther $20.87 mil­lion (sec­ond best ever to Trans­form­ers).

SSH has a nice sum­mary of The Dark Knight’s major accom­plish­ments so far:

Widest release (4,366 the­aters), biggest mid­night open­ing ($18.5M), biggest open­ing week­end ($158.4M), biggest July opener ($158.4M), biggest PG-13 rated open­ing ($158.4M), biggest sin­gle day ($67.2M), biggest open­ing day ($67.2M), biggest Fri­day ($67.2M), biggest Sun­day ($43.6M), biggest IMAX open­ing ($6.3M) and fastest to $200M in five days ($203.8M).

Source: Media by Num­bers, Thanks Keith

Mon­day July 21st was the UK and Euro­pean pre­mière of The Dark Knight, Chris­t­ian Bale, Aaron Eck­hart, Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal, Chris Nolan, Michael Caine and the tum­bler were all at hand to sign auto­graphs, greet fans and attend the shindig.

Below is a 17 video playlist of tele­vi­sion fea­tures, video inter­views and can­did shots of the Bat­mo­bile, cast and crew. YouTube is play­ing silly bug­gers and not let­ting me edit this playlist so the order of the videos may not be too great for the moment. Enjoy.

Images from out­side by Samuel Judge:

Images from inside by Ben30: