Everyone wants and expects another Batman after the greatness that was The Dark Knight, however director Christopher Nolan is not the sort of director who just does things for the money. He has said a number of times that he would only do another film if he had a story to tell (which many believe he has). However, both him and writer David Goyer intended to make The Dark Knight a standalone film, so that there would be no loose ends should a third movie never come.

Well, buried at the end of The Hollywood Reporter’s article on the marketing of The Dark Knight is a small update on the status of a third Batman film:

Warners and Legendary are both interested in doing a third in the series, but all involved say it will be up to Nolan to come to them with a story and a plan.

“There are a lot of us who emotionally would love to do it,” Roven says. “But it’s really Chris’ call. Chris is the kind of filmmaker who just doesn’t think about the next movie before he has completely finished the movie he is working on.”

For now, Nolan is taking a well-earned vacation. Says Roven, “When he comes back, we will see how he feels.”

If I were Nolan I wouldn’t rush myself. After Batman Begins Nolan took time out from the Batman world and made The Prestige. I think he should do the same this time by making another movie over the course of 2009 and then start working on the third Batman film for 2011.

Some crazy rumor has been whipping around that Cher, who is best known for having plastic surgery and being old, will play Catwoman in Christopher Nolan’s follow up to The Dark Knight, or Batman 3 as some like to call it. This bullcrap comes courtesy of The Telegraph:

A studio executive said: “Cher is Nolan’s first choice to play Catwoman. He wants to her to portray her like a vamp in her twilight years.

“The new Catwoman will be the absolute opposite of Michelle Pfeiffer and Halle Berry’s purring creations.”

Well Film School Rejects must have had a slow news day, as they decided to follow up this bull by contacting Cher’s agent.

“I would LOVE nothing more than for Cher to play Catwoman,” said her manager Risa Shapiro in this morning’s phone interview. “She’d be great. She’s one of the most extraordinary women anyone could ever meet. But I haven’t received any phone call about this, and hadn’t even heard about it. I think I’ll call Chris Nolan and find out what’s going on.”

I suspect Nolan will reveal to her agent that this is just a dumbass rumor, he hasn’t even started writing the script, no casting will be done for at least a year and Catwoman won’t even be in the next film.

With the success of The Dark Knight there’s a good chance Christopher Nolan, David Goyer and Jonathan Nolan will be getting a phone call from Warner Bros. some time soon asking them to free up their schedule and start thinking about ‘Batman 3′, ‘The Dark Knight 2′ or whatever you want to call it until an official title is announced. Luckily for Warner Bros, David Goyer and co have already been talking about it.

“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

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.”

Where do you want the third movie to go?

Next week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly will feature Batman and The Joker on the front cover. You can read the whole Dark Knight cover story, including interviews with Christian Bale and director Christopher Nolan, by going to EW.com.

There are a lot of great movie soundtracks out there, however my favourites include The Lord of the Rings (Naturally), 300 (Spartans!!!) and Batman Begins. Christopher Nolan’s first take on the Batman world is regarded as one of the best superhero movies ever made, and the music by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard just adds to the greatness. It is dark, emotional and just simply amazing. So the fact that Zimmer and Howard were re-teaming for The Dark Knight gave my ears a twitch, like that of a drug user who needs his fix. Hans Zimmer has said a few times that he deliberately held some pieces of music back from Batman Begins, as he felt that Bruce Wayne hadn’t earned it yet. We are certainly in for a treat!

Amazon.com has now made the score available to pre-order. It will not be released until July 1st, two weeks before The Dark Knight is released on the big screen. To pre-order yours click here!

I hate it when outside interferences change what I see on the big screen, so I guess I will end up hating this if it is true. According to CinemaBlend, The Dark Knight has been secretly shown to audiences and according to their tipster, some members of the audience were not happy with one particular scene.

The scene involves Ledger’s Joker character pretending to be dead and being pictured in a body bag. Apparently the aftershock of Ledger’s unfortunate death are such that many in the screening reacted rather badly to this moment and now execs are considering excising the scene altogether.

I can remember it just as if it were yesterday. There were images on the news showing Heath Ledger being brought out in a body bag. It wasn’t very pleasant, but it is what happened. I don’t want Warner Brothers to get rid of the scene, because the scene is obviously there for a reason. Christopher Nolan has created this character, and has imagine what kind of antics The Joker should get up to. The Joker is sick and twisted and pretending to be dead in a body bag would be what he would do. Why should things change just because people can’t accept reality and find it hard to realise it is just a movie?

The good news is that The Dark Knight will probably be better than Batman Begins, and Batman Begins was one of the best comic book movies ever made. It is also likely that Heath Ledger’s portrayal as The Joker will be amazing, with out without pretending to be dead in a body bag.

One topic that we haven’t heard much about regarding the upcoming Dark Knight movie is Batman and his gadgets. He hasn’t got any super powers, his gadgets are what he uses to fight crime. In Batman Begins we saw the tumbler and a couple of other cool things, but what about in The Dark Knight? MTV Movies Blog got a chance to talk to director Christopher Nolan and he shed some light on this very important issue!

“Batman’s got a lot of gizmos and gadgets and things,” director Chris Nolan explained. “The Bat Pod [motorcycle] being the largest of them, the most apparent. He also has this very cool sticky bomb gun that fires mines with timers on them, that he uses to set off explosions in sequence, and it folds up in this very peculiar manner and fits on the belt.”

“The utility belt is one of the great things about Batman,” he gushed. “You just never know what is going to come out of that thing next, and that’s one of the things I loved as a kid about the character. We tried to preserve that, that sense of fun about those gadgets, in the film.”

I will always remember the chessy scene in the 1940 Batman film, where Batman is battling against a shark on a ladder, which is attached to a helicopter. Batman shouts up to Robin ‘Hand me down the shark repellent bat spray!’, to which Robin turns around to the conveniently placed repellent, grabs it, climbs down the ladder, hands it to Batman, who then sprays the shark. The shark then falls back into the ocean and explodes. Hilarious! (watch it here)

I doubt we will get such an action scene in The Dark Knight, but I am sure Nolan can try his best.

For me, there is one moment more than any other that sets “Batman Begins” apart from “Spider-Man”, that establishes the key differences in tone, and in the worldviews on display in each film. That moment comes during the film’s climactic set-piece. After dispatching one of Ra’s al Ghul’s henchmen, Batman takes a tumble, landing among some of the denizens of The Narrows. Now, in a Spider-Man movie, this would be the moment where the ordinary citizens band around the hero in a show of support (“Us New Yorkers stick together!”). But in “Batman Begins”, the panicking crowd form a mob and attack Batman, forcing him to fight back against the very people he’s trying to save. It’s a stark difference, which encapsulates the fact that this Batman is not the squeaky-clean man of the people that Spider-Man embodies, and suggests a dark heart beating beneath the film’s heroics. If “Spider-Man” was the early, defiant response to the atrocity of 9/11, America united through the belief that good will prevail (and Spider-Man existing in a New York where the Twin Towers still proudly stand), then “Begins” is its darker cousin, embodying the contrasting response: paranoia, uncertainty, and a fair share of moral questions.

In many ways, “Batman Begins” is like an anti-superhero movie. Rather than create a fantasy world where superheroes can exist, Nolan and Goyer take the superhero out of his element and place him in our world. Serious questions about what drives a man to put on a costume and fight crime – and the consequences of doing so – are raised, and many of our assumptions are challenged. And that’s not just relating to the superhero genre in general, but to our assumptions surrounding the Batman mythos. Take Gotham City. For so long presented as a nightmarish, Gothic nightscape, Nolan first presents his Gotham – a shiny, modern metropolis much like Chicago – in bright daylight. People have complained that grounding the setting of the action so much makes the film too “realistic” (the dreaded word) and strips away the larger-than-life elements of Batman. I disagree. When the rest of the world is so grounded and gritty, I feel the presence of a figure like Batman seems all the more fantastical. His impact is truly felt.

Read more…

The New York Times sat down with Christopher Nolan and a few other people involved with The Dark Knight, and talked a bit about the movie. The discussions involved Nolan’s view on the film, the death of Heath Ledger and we also get a few spoilers along the way. There are a couple of other interesting bits. Apparently Warner Brothers tried to get Nolan to direct Troy, which Wolfgang Petersen ended up directing. That would have been something to watch, however I’m glad he ended up doing Batman Begins. You can read the whole article by clicking here, however beware of spoilers!

The article is accompanied by some new images, which you can see below.

Over the past week or so there have been many people expressing their sadness about Heath Ledger’s passing. Nicole Kidman, John Travolta and Mary Kate Olsen have all released statements regarding Heath’s Death. Jack Nicholson told everyone that he had ‘warned him’ and Daniel Day Lewis nearly shed a few tears on TV, even though he said he had never met Ledger. So imagine knowing Heath well, and having to see him every single day for the next few months. That is what Christopher Nolan has to do as he is editing The Dark Knight. Rather than releasing a statement that says the usual, he had written an great article on Heath.

When you get into the edit suite after shooting a movie, you feel a responsibility to an actor who has trusted you, and Heath gave us everything. As we started my cut, I would wonder about each take we chose, each trim we made. I would visualize the screening where we’d have to show him the finished film—sitting three or four rows behind him, watching the movements of his head for clues to what he was thinking about what we’d done with all that he’d given us. Now that screening will never be real. I see him every day in my edit suite. I study his face, his voice. And I miss him terribly.

You can read the whole article here.