The Brazil­ian site Omelette got the scoop on this first, but that’s all in a for­eign lan­guage, so let me explain. The rumor is that in front of IMAX screen­ings of I Am Leg­end, a 7 minute pro­logue seg­ment of The Dark Knight will run. This will not be a trailer, but an entire scene with begin­ning, mid­dle and end.

Accord­ing to Omelette the seg­ment shall fea­ture Heath Ledger as The Joker — a sort of back­ground if you will, run­ning in par­al­lel with the end of Bat­man Begins and the start of TDK. Film ick think that the footage will revolve around a bank heist, which was shot in the IMAX format.

This shall only run in front of the IMAX ver­sion of I Am Leg­end, a proper Dark Knight trailer may instead run in nor­mal cin­e­mas, but that is merely conjecture.

We’ll keep you posted!

The ever infor­ma­tive and inter­est­ing Quint over at AICN has heard some rumors cir­cu­lat­ing about the next Super­man movie involv­ing one par­tic­u­lar actor from Super­man I and II repris­ing his role. I’ll let Quint Continue…

This [source] has per­son­ally observed Bryan Singer at work on VALKYRIE and appar­ently [Singer] has been putting pres­sure on one of his cast mem­bers to return to his star-making role as a vil­lain in Singer’s SUPERMAN sequel.

That, of course, would be Ter­ence Stamp, the role would be that of Gen­eral Zod.

For some back­ground read­ing on the Zod sub­ject I rec­om­mend Wikipedia, which has sum­maries of Zod’s his­tory and role within the Super­man movie universe.

Once Mil­i­tary Direc­tor of the Kryp­ton­ian Space Cen­ter, Zod had known Jor-El, Superman’s father, when he was an aspir­ing sci­en­tist. When the space pro­gram was abol­ished after the destruc­tion of the moon Wegthor (caused by rene­gade sci­en­tist Jax-Ur), he attempted to take over Kryp­ton. Zod cre­ated an army of robotic dupli­cates of him­self, all bear­ing a resem­blance to Bizarro. He was sen­tenced to the Phan­tom Zone for his crimes.

This was a turn up for the books. Unlike the well antic­i­pated Chicago demo­li­tion, this explo­sion came com­pletely unprompted and minus the live video footage, heli­copter feed and local photographers.

How­ever, The Lon­don Paper were on scene to cap­ture some images and make a com­pre­hen­sive report, to our delight.

The emer­gency ser­vices were flooded with calls from local res­i­dents who feared the defunct elec­tric­ity gen­er­at­ing plant had been tar­geted by terrorists.

But they were reas­sured the 200ft fire­ball, accom­pa­nied by columns of grey smoke, which could bee seen for miles across the cap­i­tal, was a spe­cial effect for the lat­est Bat­man film.

SPOILER: The spec­tac­u­lar stunt scene, in which Bat­man actor Chris­t­ian Bale nar­rowly cheats death, is believed to be the open­ing sequence of the fifth caped cru­sader movie The Dark Knight.

Res­i­dent Marck Jason, 24, of Bat­tersea, said: “I was gob­s­macked. I was just walk­ing home and saw this bloody huge explosion.

“Obvi­ously my first thought was that it was a ter­ror­ist attack and I dialled 999.

“I know it’s sort of cool that the place is being used for a film, as its a bril­liant build­ing, but a bit of warn­ing wouldn’t have hurt.”

If any­one has more from the scene we’d love to hear from you!

Via Daily Mail

Not related to the gears of war movie directly, how­ever it is of inter­est to the read­ers of this blog, so I am men­tion­ing it here.

Jerry O’Flaherty, art direc­tor for the Gears of War video game, will be under­tak­ing the chal­lenge of direct­ing Warner Bros’ CG-animated Thun­der­cats adap­ta­tion — so reports Vari­ety.

I think I would pre­fer a live action Thun­der­cats, maybe it’s just the thoughts of who could pull off the Chee­tara role, whilst look­ing sexy and not ruin­ing their career.

Are many peo­ple inter­ested in this movie?

Thanks to John again for the heads up!

Fel­low Briton what­ley­dude has man­aged to snap a pic­ture of a Gotham City police van whilst it encir­cled Lon­don on the M25 motor­way, atop a trailer.

Sup­plied with the expressed per­mis­sion of What­ley­dude.

Game­Pro were given the oppor­tu­nity to talk with Gears of War movie writer Stu­art Beat­tie, in an exclu­sive inter­view. Here are some choice extracts from the infor­ma­tive article:

“The per­cep­tion of videogames in Hol­ly­wood is chang­ing slowly. Hol­ly­wood likes to do what’s proven. They’ve already proved that books work, and plays can work, and recently that comic books can work. But they’ve yet to have a film be as suc­cess­ful as say Spider-Man, that’s based on a videogame. 

[…] While there are more and more videogame movies being made because there are more and more videogames being made, there still hasn’t been that one that has hit it out of the park yet. At the moment, I would say the per­cep­tion of videogame movies in Hol­ly­wood is: they are inter­ested, they’re intrigued, but they’re still not com­pletely sure if it can actu­ally work.”

As for the use of a 300-esque green screen approach,

“[…] That film was shot com­pletely on green screen, which is amaz­ing when you actu­ally see the film. It’s prob­a­bly how we’re going to do Gears of War.”

[Refer­ring to GOW] It’s a planet and it’s a bub­ble and it’s a build­ing. It’s an epic sci-fi war and an enor­mous film. To get it made at all, the only way to make it for a price is to be on a sound­stage. But the game also has that look, which is really inter­est­ing, so I think it will dove­tail really nicely.”

Beat­tie also hopes that the film will be “extremely col­lab­o­ra­tive”.

As to our pre­vi­ous story, wherein we reported that the movie could be on hold, we received this very encour­ag­ing E-mail,

GEARS OF WAR is not stalled in any way, shape, or form. We are sim­ply in the process of find­ing the right direc­tor. This is always a del­i­cate and dif­fi­cult task, and with mul­ti­ple loom­ing strikes, even more so. Be patient, stay tuned, news will come.

“Bed­ford Today”, a local news web­site, are report­ing that Rory’s First Kiss (aka the lat­est Bat­man sequel) signs have been appear­ing in the Card­ing­ton area once again:

It is believed the secrecy-shrouded shoot at Card­ing­ton involves the mas­sive Gotham City set built in the rear of the shed for the ear­lier movie and left stand­ing afterwards.

The Times & Cit­i­zen under­stands dog-handlers have come over from the USA for one sequence, thought to involve a chase fea­tur­ing the Batmobile.

Via Bat Movie News

Movieweb have posted a press­ing inter­view with Michael Caine.  Here he once again talks up the bril­liant por­trayal of The Joker by Heath Ledger,

“I can tell you the biggest secret. The most shock­ing thing for both you and I, […] It’s Heath Ledger as the Joker. He is going to sur­prise a lot of peo­ple. He is absolutely ter­ri­fy­ing. I’d say that he is the scari­est thing I’ve ever seen on screen.”

Read the rest of this entry »