The third official poster for The Dark Knight Rises has appeared online.  As you know, Batman is exceptionally good at brooding and his home city of Gotham is exceptionally good at coming apart at the seams.  Both of these things are happening on the new one-sheet, with Batman a-brooding and Gotham going up in flames.

What's kind of like the NBA Playoffs?  The war to control the fictitious Gotham City in The Dark Knight Rises, the climactic installment of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy.  Both the movie and the playoffs feature a man dressed up as a giant Bat using a high tech arsenal to fight crime, a burglarizing woman dressed like a slinky cat, and a monomaniacal villain who you can bet won't win out in the end.  Okay, so the playoffs don't have those first two, but the inhabitants of Cleveland could persuasively argue that LeBron James fits the bill for the last one.

With a certain Marvel Studios superhero team-up making money hand over fist in record-breaking amounts of time, there's been a lot of discussion about the box office fate of the third and final installment in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy.  All this talk of comparative opening weekends is not only premature, it misses the basic and undeniably happy point that this a summer in which we're treated to both The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises.

Synopsis: The conclusion to Christopher Nolan's hugely successful Batman trilogy concludes the story that started with Batman Begins and continued through The Dark Knight.  Eight years after the last film, Bruce Wayne faces his greatest challenge when the villainous Bane comes to Gotham, using terrorist tactics to take over the city and break the Batman.  To emerge triumphant, the hero will need to marshal the forces of order, including Catwoman and the police force.

Things have been pretty quiet on the Dark Knight Rises front as of late.  With Marvel and Disney's orgiastic superhero crossover The Avengers monopolizing our superhero hype attentions, Warner Bros has wisely opted to let Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, and Thor have their time.  The second full theatrical trailer for The Dark Knight Rises is set to debut with The Avengers this Friday, though, so Batman's about to start getting his hype on all over again.

While we've been happily inundated with hype-building material from a certain Marvel and Disney joint, the promotional juggernaut for a big, bat-loving DC Comics hero has been quietly getting ready to bombard audiences.  The Dark Knight Rises is arguably the most anticipated movie of the summer, and it's appropriate that a new trailer will precede the other most anticipated movie, The Avengers.  When the final Christopher Nolan-directed Batman adventure arrives, it will boast more than a full hour of footage shot on IMAX cameras.

The Avengers premiered last night and Twitter promptly lit up with enthusiastic responses to Marvel and Disney's big team-up.  As if in a calculated move, a crop of new The Dark Knight Rises images are floating about online to make audiences conflicted about which summer superhero movie they're has them in the biggest mouth-foaming fervor.  The newly rated PG-13 capper to Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy has been in post-production for months, and we've not seen much from the film, so lap up these seven new stills.

Okay, let's make this clear right out the gate: this whole post exists in spoiler territory.  It's been quite some time since we've heard anything about The Dark Knight Rises.  Long past are the days of consistently spoilerific set photos and what have you, as Christopher Nolan is deep in post-production on the finale to his Bat-trilogy, but today Warner Bros. has confirmed a certain long-rumored character appearance in the film.  Again, if you're not down with a spoiler just stop reading right now.  Like right at this moment.  Read no more.

For all their epic sprawl, tick-tock precise storytelling, and self-seriousness, it's easy to forget that Christopher Nolan's Batman films are still big budget superhero movies.  That means that, no matter how unsmiling Christian Bale's Caped Crusader may inevitably be, The Dark Knight Rises will be accompanied by a merchandising bonanza that includes lunchboxes, stickers, PEZ dispensers, personal pleasure devices, and endless toys.  Today we have a handful of looks at some of those toys, which are varying degrees of ridiculous, but will be greedily gobbled up by fans of all ages nonetheless.

"Hello, everyone.  I'm Batman.  You're probably familiar with my work brutalizing criminals as the subject of the very successful movies Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.  As you no doubt guessed, I'm a pretty busy guy; between fighting the ever-rising tide of wrongdoing in Gotham City, running a bajillion-dollar company, and brooding over the murder of my parents, I hardly ever get a minute to relax with some bath salts, wine, and a good book.  But I'm here today to tell you that I'm on the cover of a magazine!  Also, my buddies at Warner Bros have released three new official stills from The Dark Knight Rises, the forthcoming sequel where some dude in a muzzle beats the hell out of me.  Take a look, because you know you're jonesing for The Dark Knight Rises.  My movies are just so damn good."