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.

How about we start this week off with three new Looper-related images? 

Earlier this month, we saw the first trailer for Rian Johnson's third theatrical feature, and that trailer laid out the film's basic time-travel premise.  The idea is that, in the future, time-travel exists but is completely illegal and used almost exclusively by criminals sending victims back in time so as to leave no evidence of murder.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a looper, a guy who kills people sent back in time, but who has a problem when his latest hit turns out to be himself in the future.

Okay, after several teases for the trailer, the actual trailer for Looper is now viewable online.  And it was worth the teasing.  The third movie from writer-director Rian Johnson looks like a spectacularly good time, and a potentially incredible mix of heady science fiction and all out throat-grabbing action, as Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt engaged in a time traveling version of the most dangerous game.

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.

Last week closed out with the debut of the first official one sheet for Looper, this fall's science fiction action movie from the one and only Rian Johnson.  This week will see the premiere of the film's trailer, but we're going to have wait three days for it to arrive online.  For now, a video tease that lasts just under a minute should suffice.