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.

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.

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.

It's been awhile since we heard much from Man of Steel, the new Superman movie currently being directed by Zack Snyder.  In fact, the last thing we posted on the reboot was a picture of Henry Cavill kindly posing for a picture with a young lad whilst wearing his full Superman gear.  Two months later, there are some new, albeit bite-sized, info-nuggets on the film from the guy who designed that costume, Michael Wilkinson.

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.

This morning you may have seen some images of an Incredible Hulk action figure or two from The Avengers.  Those pictures came from the floor of Toy Fair in London, and now, the collectible expo has revealed some promotional artwork for products tying in to this summer's other superhero epic, The Dark Knight Rises.

The products in question are from DC Direct, which creates not missile-fired action figures for tots, but higher-end busts and the like for collectors.  For the finale installment of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, DC Direct is manufacturing some new figures and busts based on Batman, Bane, and Catwoman, played respectively by Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, and Anne Hathaway.

Anticipation for The Dark Knight Rises is such that within four days of the IMAX prologue debuting on just 42 North American screens and one day of the latest trailer showing up online, one persistent complaint already became something of a meme and a worry for Warner Bros.  That one major complaint amongst all the ecstatic hyperbole was the difficulty in understanding dialogue from Batman's new nemesis, the muzzled and musclebound Bane, played by Tom Hardy.  Franchise director Christopher Nolan declared that no major corrections to Bane's voice would be made, but it seems Warner Bros has issued a new audio mix for that six-minute IMAX prologue.

What will the Batcave, Bruce Wayne's subterranean hangout, look like in The Dark Knight Rises?  After Wayne Manor was burned down in Batman Begins, both the ancestral mansion and the guano-covered sat out The Dark Knight in favor of a Gotham penthouse and a nondescript underground bunker.  With Wayne Manor making a comeback, though, we've known for some time that the new sequel would also contain some new and improved Batcave action.  While a previous rumor suggested that a Romanian salt mine will make for a substantially more spacy, cavernous cave, there's been no indication that Christoher Nolan and company actually spent any time in Romania.  Now there's a new rumored description of the cave asserting that it will look very much like it did the last time we saw it.

A week ago, director Christopher Nolan dropped some fairly big story information on The Dark Knight Rises, along with a crop of images that we saw as pretty low-quality scans, but today we've got some bigger, cleaner, cooler versions of the aforementioned images.  So now you can get a better look at Christian Bale once again rocking the bat-armor on his batpod and in chilly-looking Gotham City.  The big show here, though, is definitely Tom Hardy's Bane, who is striking a pose, standing atop a Tumbler besmirching Harvey Dent's good name, and seemingly shouting "Come at me, bro!" at an exhausted-looking Dark Knight.  Oh, and there's even a new behind the scenes picture of Nolan (C-Note, as he's known on the streets of Gotham) with one of those bulky, loud, and expensive IMAX cameras of which he is so fond.