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It looks like the sequel to The Dark Knight will commence shooting in 2009:

We recently reported that Batman 3 is among the four DC Comics film adaptations that Warner Bros. wants out in theaters by 2011. Now comes word that the sequel to The Dark Knight could shoot as soon as next year.

According to not one but two reports at Batman-on-Film.com, behind the scenes sources have informed BoF that pre-production on the next Bat-film is slated to begin around next February in Chicago for a summer ‘09 shoot.

“What’s interesting is that info seems to be originating from folks who worked on TDK behind the scenes — set builders, stuntmen, film crew, etc. — in Chicago,” BoF said. “As far as this buzz coming from former TDK crew members, there’s probably something to this as you can’t hire these guys at the very last minute. If sets need to be built and other miscellaneous pre-preproduction projects need to get done, I suspect that readying these things a year and a half/two years in advance is NOT out of the question.”

As far anyone knows, TDK director Christopher Nolan and his brother and co-screenwriter Jonah Nolan have yet to sign a deal for Batman 3.

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The folks over at IGN wants your help to topple Titanic from the top spot as the highest grossing film of all time. The views concerning Titanic is IGN’s alone:

It was 1997. Titanic opened just before Christmas. It was one of those movies that debuted at exactly the right time, striking every possible chord with audiences. The subject matter, for whatever reason, was a source of fascination for people at the time. The movie had just the right cast — Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were on the verge of superstardom. It utilized exciting, headline-grabbing filmmaking techniques to tell its period story. And we may cringe just thinking about Celine Dion with that giant rock around her elongated neck, but the film was set to music that was absolutely perfect for the times.

And so it was. Grown men cried, virgins were deflowered, and Titanic became the #1 movie of all time. The world was changed. It was that big of a deal.

But a funny thing happened… Time passed, and cinematic tastes evolved. Now, there are plenty of classic Hollywood films that have weathered these changes. But Titanic isn’t one of them. Ironically, the things that made it so very appropriate for the late-1990s, are the things that make it seem so incredibly dated now. Today, Titanic plays like a sickeningly schmaltzy cheese-fest of epic proportions. And that’s why it must be defeated as the top-grossing domestic movie ever. It simply cannot stand! But who will take back the box office crown?

Enter The Dark Knight. Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece of a sequel to Batman Begins. Now, who knows if we’ll look back on this film the same way in a decade, but we’re pretty sure it’ll still remain one of the best movies we’ve ever seen. That’s why we’re taking it upon ourselves here at IGN to launch a grassroots effort aimed at making The Dark Knight the highest-grossing flick ever. And we need your help, Bat-fans!

TDK, after nine weeks of release, has the second-highest domestic gross of all time — over $517 million. Titanic is still floating atop the list with $600.8 million. For you math geniuses out there, that’s an $83 million deficit. And with the Bat-sequel only pulling in around $4 million this weekend, we’ve all got some work to do. So, spread the word! Let’s get out in force to see The Dark Knight for the umpteenth time, and deliver a shattering Batarang blow right to Jack Dawson’s stunningly gorgeous jaw.

Can we do it? Yes, we can. The Dark Knight has been in theaters for 9 weeks. Titanic enjoyed a whopping 41-week run. That long of a run may not be in the cards for The Dark Knight as the DVD and Blu-ray release are expected in December, but an IMAX rerelease has already been announced for January, so that’s sure to help the cause. For now, the flick is still playing in 2,191 theaters. So, let’s get out there and fill some seats, people!

We hope you’ll join us and do your part to make the world a better place. We’ll be back next week with an update on TDK’s gross and our campaign’s progress. Until then, “¡Sí, se puede!”

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Batman 3 is set to hit theaters in 2011.

With The Dark Knight not only the biggest hit of 2008 but also one the highest grossing movies of all time, Warner Bros. is understandably eager to bring director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale back to the Batcave as soon as possible.

According to The Wall Street Journal, “The studio is set to announce its plans for future DC movies in the next month. For now, though, it is focused on releasing four comic-book films in the next three years, including a third Batman film, a new film reintroducing Superman, and two movies focusing on other DC Comics characters.”

Given the success of the grim and gritty Dark Knight, Warner Bros. Pictures Group President Jeff Robinov says the studio’s upcoming DC movie slate is “going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it.”

It was recently reported that Warners has an offer out to Nolan to direct Batman 3 but that the director had yet to commit to it. Studio boss Alan Horn told Variety at the time, “We have no idea where Chris is going with this. … We haven’t had any conversations with him about it.”

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David Goyer, co-writer for Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, is suggesting that the villains in the next film might not be household names.

Even though there is no Batman 3 currently in development, that hasn’t stopped speculation and rumors from running rampant about which characters might terrorize Gotham City in a potential third installment.

David Goyer, who co-wrote the script for Batman Begins and developed the story for The Dark Knight with director Christopher Nolan, suggested to SCI FI Wire that the villains in the next film might not be household names. “There’s no reason why we necessarily have to use the same three or four that are still around,” Goyer said. “I mean, Batman’s got a wide variety, [a] rogues’ gallery. Certainly we used two in the first movie that hadn’t been in the films before.”

MTV asked a number of prominent comic book writers and execs who they think should be the villain in Batman 3. For example, DC Comics Executive Editor Dan DiDio suggested Professor Hugo Strange. He added, “Characters like Catwoman, Riddler, and Hugo Strange make sense, because they’re counterpoints to Batman’s psychosis and fears. The Joker creates chaos. Two-Face shows the duality of the Batman-Bruce Wayne relationship, and how Batman’s found peace with that duality. Batman searches for answers, and the Riddler has questions. Batman is driven, and Catwoman is sexual. They play well against each other and challenge aspects of what makes a hero.”

30 Days of Night creator Steve Niles said, “I’d like to see Catwoman over the Penguin. Not as a prostitute, and not as the Tim Burton version — what, cats sniffed her back to life? — but perhaps the Adam Hughes design, with the goggles. That’s very realistic. I can imagine her in street clothes that are designed just right. I also like the idea of them creating villains just for the movies.”

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We have the UK review for The Dark Knight. Read on:

With The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan has rewritten the rules for making a big budget summer event movie.

Since the days of The Godfather in the early ’70s, Hollywood’s film studios have been, almost without exception, scared stiff of peppering their populist cash-cows with grandiose, weighty and thought-provoking themes, preferring instead to programme lightweight, action-packed fare for the summer and prestige, serious projects for awards season.

Yet The Dark Knight sees these sensibilities outrageously and stunningly collide; the film is an unbelievably intense, kinetic head-rush of a movie yet, simultaneously, a two-and-a-half hour meditation on the breakdown of society, the morality of vigilantism and a multi-layered rumination on good and evil.

We pick up a year after the events of Begins, with Batman, together with allies Lieutenant Gordon and crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent, apparently winning the battle against crime. The presence of Batman on Gotham’s streets has law-breakers on the run, with criminals afraid to go about their dark misdeeds with the famous Bat-Signal lighting the night sky. Things are seemingly on the up - that is until a mysterious, scar-faced psychopathic criminal mastermind called ‘The Joker’ appears, intent on unleashing chaos throughout Gotham City.

It was inevitable that thousands of column inches would be devoted to the man who plays him - with writers first pondering how Heath Ledger’s untimely death would affect the movie’s marketing and box office, and then pushing his performance for an Oscar win (he’s currently odds-on to posthumously receive a statuette) - something his simply electric turn would doubtless deserve.

We knew his portrayal would be something special from the trailers, but the full, magnetic force of Ledger’s turn as the charismatic, amoral sadist can only be truly appreciated in its full, furious glory. Every moment the actor’s on screen, it’s impossible to take your eyes off his panda-eyed post-punk anarchist. Whenever you think he’s going to slip into a comedy pastiche, Ledger shows us a glimpse of the true darkness and nihilism lurking within his character. It’s a tour-de-force and its power overshadows the raft of similarly fine performances in the film.

Indeed, despite Ledger’s showy brilliance, we think director Christopher Nolan is the real star of The Dark Knight. The canny helmer draws superlative turns from his multi-garlanded cast. Bale, Caine, Freeman, Eckhart and Oldman make for a powerhouse ensemble, imbuing their roles with an emotional depth - and the odd flash of humour - that fits marvellously with the opaque morality and bleak tone of the movie.

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Question: Could a person really be Batman? Answer: Yes, says Paul Zehr, kinesiology and neuroscience professor at the University of Victoria.

The dream of almost everyone who has flipped open a Batman comic book, to don the cape and to fight crime, is humanly possible, says a University of Victoria professor who has written a book about it.

But the stress it would put on the body, similar to an Olympic athlete or champion boxer, would make a career as the caped crusader short-lived.

“What I did was draw from all kinds of other activities and say, ‘What is Batman like?’” said Paul Zehr, who teaches kinesiology and neuroscience at the University of Victoria.

He is also author of the book Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero.

“Part of what he does is like being an NFL running back. Part of what he does is like being an ultimate fighter, like being a boxer … and if you look at all the science behind those things and you put all this together, what does it mean for someone who is actually trying to be Batman? It’s not a training manual per se, but it gives the background of what can people really achieve.”

Zehr’s book is already drawing fan buzz due to hype surrounding The Dark Knight movie, which opens in theatres today. The book won’t be released until October, through Johns Hopkins University Press, but Internet pre-sales are “through the roof,” he said.

Drawing upon hundreds of comic books and graphic novels, Zehr, the director of the university’s Centre for Biomedical Research, delved into the physical fitness and training necessary to pull off Batman’s nightly fisticuffs with henchman and high-wire rooftop acrobatics.

It would require a man at his absolute physical peak, most closely resembling an Olympic decathlete, with three to five years of intense physical conditioning and 10 to 12 years of martial arts and motor skill training, said Zehr. He’d also need another few years working under incredible pressure and stress, he said.

But the human body can only handle such stress for so long. By researching athletes such as Muhammad Ali, ultimate fighter Randy Couture and NFL linebackers, Zehr said he gives Batman a three-year peak before he is felled by serious injuries, such as repeated concussions.

“Based on some of these numbers, he’d become Batman, be the best Batman possible for about three years, and then he’s done,” said Zehr. “There’s a whole lot of training to get to that point.”

Even when he’s at his peak, one of the major constraints hampering a real-life Batman would be his unwillingness to kill, said Zehr, 40, himself a black belt in Chito-ryu karate. “This is the thing where he gets into a crazy amount of poise and training needed,” said Zehr. “It’s much easier to seriously injure someone.” It is possible to fight large groups of villains at once, and succeed, but it gets especially complicated when you have to look for non-lethal ways to subdue people intent on killing you, he said.

Zehr’s real-life research focuses on body motion rehabilitation after severe spinal cord injuries and strokes. A lifelong Batman fan, he said he hopes to make science more interesting by integrating it with pop culture.

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IGN’s Senior editor, Todd Gilchrist and Rich George have a great must watch video review of The Dark Knight. Check it out.

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The long awaited summer blockbuster: The Dark Knight opens Friday, July 18th. Other movies opening alongside the Batman flick are: Mamma Mia!, and Space Chimps.

• Space Chimps (Family/Animation/Comedy) - Cast: Featuring the vocal talents of: Andy Samberg, Cheryl Hines, Patrick Warburton, Jeff Daniels, Kenan Thompson, Kristin Chenoweth, Stanley Tucci; Directed by: Kirk De Micco

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• Mamma Mia! (Comedy) - Cast: Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgård, Christine Baranski; Directed by: Phyllida Lloyd

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  View the movie trailer and read the synopsis

• The Dark Knight (Action/Adventure/Drama) - Cast: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Maggie Gyllenhall; Directed by: Christopher Nolan

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Christopher Nolan discusses his reason for upping the ante in The Dark Knight.

The famed Batmobile is back with a vengeance in The Dark Knight - but director Christopher Nolan didn’t want to stop there.

He decided that Batman and audiences needed something new and fantastic, so he went to work in his garage at home - and came up with the Bat Pod, a high- powered, massively armed two-wheeler.

Nolan wanted the Caped Crusader to have a different means of transportation - “something very exotic and powerful-looking. But it’s definitely not a motorcycle.”

The Bat Pod has monster tires, just like the Batmobile, but it also carries heavy artillery - blast cannons, 50-calibre machine guns, even grappling hooks.

And it all happened in Nolan’s garage, a place where he constantly finds inspiration.

“We did a lot of the design work for The Dark Knight in my garage at home before we got too many people on the film. It keeps it a little more intimate and let’s us kind of explore ideas without having a massive payroll of people that we have to feed drawings to . . .”

In the case of the Bat Pod, Nolan and production designer Nathan Crowley retreated to the garage to figure out what they wanted it to be like.

“We thought - what if you took an anti-aircraft gun and put it on wheels? That was the sort of design jumping-off point. And we built small models and then, still in my garage, we actually put out a full-size mock-up to show to the special effects guys.”

The special effects guys initially freaked out when they saw what the filmmakers had in mind: Crowley recently described the encounter as “the usual clash of design versus engineering.”

After recovering from their first sight of the Bat Pod, the special effects people turned to Nolan and Crowley and bluntly said: “You guys don’t know anything about motorbikes do you?”

“We had to admit that was true,” Nolan remembers. “But then we said, ‘But it looks great! Can’t you find a way that it could work?’ And they did. They built this thing for real and it really runs. But, in terms of full disclosure, there is only one person in the world who can ride it because it is extraordinarily difficult to ride and to steer and so forth.”

And that person, of course, is Christian Bale, the most essential ingredient in the new movie if Nolan was to come back and direct it.

By the time he unveiled Batman Begins three years ago, Nolan knew he wanted to add further instalments to the saga. Having established the traumatic origins of millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, aka Batman, the 37-year-old British filmmaker felt that it was time to up the ante, throw in the sociopathic figure of The Joker (Heath Ledger) and also introduce one of the most complex villains in the Batman mythology, Harvey “Two-Face” Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and let things rip.

Nolan says he became intrigued by the idea of “escalation” in the Batman universe - “the idea that, having established Batman as this heroic figure in Gotham who’s going to take Gotham back for the good people of the city, there was going to be an incredible criminal response to that . . . so what were the criminals going to come back with? That really manifests itself in the person of The Joker. That was really my interest - taking this story forward and seeing it expand out so that Batman’s internal struggle from the first film really takes on a city-wide aspect now.

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You will want to see The Dark Knight more than once - “Repeat viewings are a certainty.”

“The Dark Knight” is pure adrenaline. Director Christopher Nolan, having dispensed with the introspective, moody origin story of 2005’s “Batman Begins,” now puts the Caped Crusader through a decathlon of explosions, vehicle flips, hand-to-hand combat, midair rescues and pulse-pounding suspense.

Nolan is one of our smarter directors. He builds movies around ideas and characters, and “Dark Knight” is no exception. The ideas here are not new to the movie world of cops and criminal, but in the context of a comic book movie, they ring out with startling clarity. In other words, you expect moralistic underpinnings in a Martin Scorsese movie; in a Batman movie, they hit home with renewed vigor.

None of this artistic achievement denies the re-energized Warner Bros./DC Comics franchise its commercial muscle. Those bags of money in the movie’s opening bank heist are nothing compared with the worldwide boxoffice haul “Dark Knight” will take from theaters following its July 18 release via Warner Bros. Repeat viewings are a certainty.

Repeat viewings might also be a necessity. That adrenaline rush comes at a cost: With the film’s race-car pace, noise levels, throbbing music and density of stratagems, no one will follow all the plot points at first glance.

“Dark Knight” revolves around notions of the yin and yang between Hero and Villain and of those gray areas where social conscience and individuality collide. Thinking logically, Nolan and his co-writer/brother Jonathan, working from a story by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, imagine that the heroism of Bruce Wayne’s Batman (a returning and very buff Christian Bale) is a double-edged sword. (A theme the current “Hancock” toyed with but badly mucked up.) Cleaning up the streets of Gotham City turns the crime cartels into an even more dangerous beast that, once cornered, resorts to its own doomsday machine: the maniacally clever and criminally amoral Joker (the late Heath Ledger). And vigilante justice is nonetheless “justice” from outside the law. So who or what polices him?

Running for cover, the mob head (Eric Roberts) first takes refuge with a Hong Kong crime mogul (Chin Han). Then when Batman takes him down, he and his fellow mobsters hold their noses and in desperation settle on a man who knows no rules and plays everyone against one another. The Joker relishes the assignment precisely because of his “admiration” for the Dark Knight. In one key confrontation, the Joker purrs to Batman, like a bride to a groom, “You complete me.” The criminal clown, his makeup designed to emphasize his facial deformations, sees in a man dressed up in a bat suit “a freak like me.”

Seemingly on the side of good are the city’s White Knight, District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart); his girlfriend/Assistant DA Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) — and, if you recall from “Batman Begins,” Bruce Wayne’s longtime love — and police Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman). But loyalties are easily dislodged by threats or money. The Joker’s true purpose, besides amusing himself trying to outwit Batman, is to see if he can “turn” the White Knight to his dark side.

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