That sound you hear is Warner Bros. opening the promotional floodgates for The Dark Knight Rises, which is the summer's biggest impending superhero movie, now that The Avengers has broken so many records and cleared the way for Christopher Nolan's climactic Batman movie.  Today, there are no fewer than six character posters for the sequel, two each for the Caped Crusader, the villainous Bane, and the adaptable Catwoman.

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.

If you thought you'd have to wait until your butt was in a seat at The Avengers to see the new trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, you were mistaken.  The third trailer for Christopher Nolan's final installment in his Batman trilogy is online in full right here, right now.

Some actors bring something special no matter the movie in which they're appearing, regardless of the size or nature of their role.  To say that Willem Dafoe is such an actor would be a dramatic understatement.  The Oscar-caliber actor has officially signed on to Relativity Media's Out of Furnace, an homage to gritty 1970s crime thrillers that follows a recently released convict as he sets out to avenge his brother.

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.

After taking cracks at three decidedly more British (okay, one Welsh) actors, the new Oldboy remake may have found an actor to play its villain on an entirely different continent.  The new take on the South Korean revenge classic is being directed by Spike Lee, and with its leading man and lady signed up and ready to go, the task has been finding the right guy to play the heavy.  It seems Sharlto Copley is the latest actor to be offered the role of the mysterious man messing with Josh Brolin.