Megan Fox has told MTV that she has signed on for Trans­form­ers 2, although the exact quote is along the lines of “I hear they are writ­ing it now… so we’ll see”, which I per­son­ally do not take as much of a con­fir­ma­tion. Of course we are in very early stages and all pos­i­tive hints that the orig­i­nal stars will return for the sequel are a good sign.

In an inter­view with About​.com, Shia La Beouf men­tioned (in pass­ing) that he would like to have an involve­ment in a trans­form­ers sequel. Noth­ing con­crete and no con­fir­ma­tion that he has signed on but it’s a pos­tive angle at least.

Shia LaBeouf: “I was think­ing about quit­ting this indus­try. And Michael Bay will tell you that. He’s so hard on his actors, […]

Why didn’t you walk off the set?

Shia LaBeouf: “Because it was too impor­tant to my career.”

You’ll never do that again.

Shia LaBeouf: “I mean, until 2 and 3.”

Vari­ety are report­ing that Para­mount Pic­tures and Dream­works  are plan­ning to release the Trans­form­ers sequel on June 26th 2009, though this may of course be sub­ject to change — espe­cially with the writer’s strike dilemma.

The arti­cle also spec­u­lates that Michael Bay will return to direct — he is in the final stages of nego­ti­a­tion. There are also high expec­ta­tions con­cern­ing Spielberg’s involve­ment with the sequel, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing his close work with the project and his ongo­ing work­ing rela­tion­ship with Shia LaBeouf (see Indi­ana Jones 4).

Batz over on the SHH forums has lov­ingly scanned in an excerpt from an inter­view with Eric Roberts (the actor that plays Sal Maroni) in FHM. This inter­view does con­tain spoil­ers con­cern­ing the Joker’s role, so I warn you to take heed before read­ing this article.

Click the image for a larger version.

Rory’s Death Kiss has updated; it now con­tains a plethora of pho­tos por­tray­ing fans dressed up as The Joker in front of famous city monuments.

There’s also a lovely lit­tle pic­ture of the jack-o-lantern with a gun to its “head”:

The New York Times caught up with Heath Ledger in Lon­don, whilst being an inter­est­ing insight into the actor’s real life habits, there are also a few inter­est­ing Joker muses in the piece.

Here too was his Joker diary, which he began com­pil­ing four months before film­ing began. It is filled with images and thoughts help­ful to the Joker back story, like a list of things the Joker would find funny. (AIDS is one of them.) Mr. Ledger seemed almost embar­rassed that the book had been spot­ted, as if he had been caught try­ing to get extra credit in school.

Via Bat­MovieNews

Ear­lier this week Slash Film got a scoop con­cern­ing an aer­ial film­ing sched­ule and IMAX qual­ity scenes. This came via a warn­ing let­ter sent from Warner Broth­ers to res­i­dents in the affected areas because of low fly­ing air­craft. The sched­ule is as follows:

They will fly through Cen­tral, West­ern and Wan Chai dis­tricts on Hong Kong Island with state-of-the-art IMAX cam­eras from Novem­ber 6th — 12th from 7:00am to 11:00pm (4 times dur­ing the day, 5 times at night). They will also be shoot­ing some C130 Low-Flying air­crafts on Novem­ber 6th — 9th from 3:00pm to 7:00pm.

CNN are also run­ning a Dark Knight/Hong Kong releated arti­cle, this time cov­er­ing some prob­lems with a par­tic­u­lar Bat­man stunt. “The plan was for Bat­man to be seen jump­ing into the water and then climb­ing up some bam­boo, or some­thing sim­i­lar”. How­ever, upon check­ing a sam­ple of the water in the area they found all sorts of nas­ties, includ­ing sal­mo­nella and tuber­cu­lo­sis. Hence the scene has been can­celled and will instead take place within a building.

The Why So Seri­ous Hal­loween Viral Mar­ket­ing Cam­paign has taken its next step in the most excit­ing of fash­ions. All the let­ters have been filled in and this pic­ture of The Joker was revealed (click for large):

Click­ing that image takes you from Why So Seri­ous to a play on the film’s film­ing title Rory’s First Kiss… Rory’s Death Kiss. Here The Joker presents us with another challenge: