This week’s merchandise world has gone loopy for The Dark Knight Rises with two stellar announcements by two of the world’s biggest collectible players, in DC Direct and Hot Toys, and 2012 looks like it’s going to be a good year for anyone who collects Bat Merch. There’s also a couple of entries from Mattel, making this the most bumperest Merch Hunter column ever. It’s been a thrill-ride, and I’d like to thanks Jesus Christ and Chris Nolan for giving me the strength to achieve this monumental feat. So anyway, this week’s Merch Hunter is dedicated to Chris Nolan’s upcoming trilogy-ender, and the news that has got collectors’ tongues wagging and seats wet in the past week or so. So put away your wallets for now, because you won’t be able to buy what is listed here just yet – and in all honesty, saving up for them is probably going to be a pragmatic decision, given how much dough is likely to be needed to buy them.

Jeff Smith’s beloved comic series “Bone,” a fantasy story about three lumpy, white, people-looking things, has been the subject of movie adaptation talks for quite some time. First Paramount was going to do something with the property, then Nickelodeon, and finally the rights landed over at Warner Bros., where last word was that they were planning a CG-animated trilogy, news that was beefed up by a four-minute short that showed off what the Bone cousins could look like. I’m not certain if these new developments are attached to that short in any way, or even if a trilogy is still the direction WB is planning on going with this one, but according to Heat Vision there are new developments concerning at least some sort of animated Bone project. They say that Sean Patrick Smith, the creator of the ABC Family series Greek, has been tapped to write a script for a Bone film, with Peter Pan director P.J. Hogan coming on to helm. Animal Logic, the animation house behind Happy Feet 2 and that Zack Snyder movie about the talking owls, is set to produce, so the plan right now is for Smith to turn in his script, Hogan to do a polish, with the production of the film then taking place in Australia, where both Hogan and Animal Logic are located.

On January 11, 1991, the then-head of Disney studios, Jeffrey Katzenberg, circulated an incredibly important memo about the state of the movie industry and the products they were making. It was called, “The World is Changing: Some Thoughts on Our Business,” and it had a simple purpose: to locate the root of a growing problem and to take steps to avoid falling victim to it. Katzenberg began the memo by stating: “As we begin the new year, I strongly believe we are entering a period of great danger and even greater uncertainty. Events are unfolding within and without the movie industry that are extremely threatening to our studio.” As we begin a new year two decades after this memo was written, it’s critical to look back at the points Katzenberg made to see that his period of great danger is now our period of great danger, to note that the same events unfolding within and without the industry still threaten the entire studio system in 2012, and to predict our future based on the past.

Take a gander at what the conceptual artists for The Avengers have dreamed up for the team of superheroes to fly around in and what Iron Man will be flying next to. It’s unclear which artist is directly responsible for the design of the Quinjet, or how Coming Soon got the image off of a Russian website, but here it is nonetheless, and the look is spot on. The really cool part of this addition to the film, for those whose noses are buried in comic books, is that it opens the door to introduce Black Panther as a character since his design firm was the one that created the jet. Will he make an appearance? Or at least be mentioned? A role for Panther hasn’t been announced, but Marvel has always enjoyed leaving surprises up their spandex sleeves. Of course, the movie could also leave the designing up to Stark Enterprises, or it might simply be a toy the government had made for the Avenger Initiative. Time will tell, but this looks damned cool.

There has long been a debate in the comic book world about what’s fair as far as creator’s rights are concerned. If you self-publish or work for one of the smaller companies, it’s possible to maintain the rights to any characters that you create while working in comics. If you want to work for one of the big guys like DC or Marvel, however, what you’re doing is work for hire. That means you’re just an employee of said company and any of the characters that you create while writing a Marvel or DC book are not your property, but the property of the company. While young comic creators are more than happy to agree to terms like this when they’re starving and hungry for work, regrets can sometimes develop later on if a character gets popular and starts to bring in huge amounts of revenue. This is especially true now that comic book properties are routinely being developed into big budget films that bring in hundreds of millions of dollars. DC has famously had troubles dealing with the estates of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster, who have been trying to get back control of the Superman pie for many years, and recently Marvel has had its own batch of troubles thanks to a man named Gary Friedrich. Friedrich worked as a freelancer for the House of Ideas back in the early 70s, and part of his output was the creation of a character named Ghost Rider, a [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Hedy Lamarr was a darkly beautiful, iconic star of the 30s and 40s, probably best known for her starring role in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah. She is also, apparently, a great inspiration for Anne Hathaway as she crafted her Catwoman/Selina Kyle character for Chris Nolan’s forthcoming The Dark Knight Rises. “I know this sounds odd, but her breathing is extraordinary,” Hathaway told the LA Times. “She takes these long, deep, languid breaths and exhales slowly. There’s a shot of her in Ecstasy exhaling a cigarette and I took probably five breaths during her one exhale. So I started working on my breathing a lot.” Apparently nothing about Lammarr shockingly going topless for the movie back in 1933 made its way into Catwoman. Hathaway talks more about breathing and delves a bit more into the challenges in the must-read piece from Geoff Boucher, but beware of a mild spoiler for one of the scenes. The most reassuring part of the talk? That the costume is more functional than fantasy. Once again, Nolan seems to be looking out for logic, even in a world that defies it. This is more great information about one of, if not the most, anticipated movies of 2012.

Have you heard of this movie called The Avengers? Apparently it’s a team-up movie of a group of at least semi-known superheroes that is being directed by a guy named Joss Whedon, who may have already done some genre work in his past. There hasn’t been any news throughout the film’s production that Whedon and company were filming things with 3D cameras, so you probably haven’t been anticipating it getting a 3D release; but you would be wrong. Today Disney announced that come May 4, 2012, The Avengers will be hitting theaters both in 2D and 3D versions. What does this mean as far as the nuts and bolts of the filmmaking goes? It means that once the movie is put together, it will have to go through the 3D post-conversion process, which is controversial. Perhaps most famously, Clash of the Titans came out sporting post-converted 3D, and audiences were heard to unanimously groan at how subtle and non-existent the 3D effects were. The issue with this is that shoddy post-produced 3D movies sport a ticket price that is just as jacked up as films that are shot natively in 3D, and perhaps deserve the extra few bucks.

If you liked Joe Johnston’s superhero action flick Captain America: The First Avenger this summer, you might want to watch some of his older movies. No, I’m not talking about The Wolfman. I’m talking about his other comic book film from 1991: The Rocketeer. In honor of its 20th anniversary, Disney has released the film for the first time on Blu-ray. Fans of The Rocketeer will recognize the fact that the rocket pack is powered by alcohol. What a coincidence… so is this column. Take a few drinks from your own rocket pack and enjoy this classic adventure in high definition.

A story has been making the rounds today that Tom Cruise is more than likely set to star in director Doug Liman’s next venture, a sci-fi film called All You Need is Kill. Variety says that the star has been courted for the role for a while and seems to be poised to take it, while Inside Movies claims that the deed has already been done and the papers are all signed up, so no matter who you believe, it’s looking like this will be a project coming, at least eventually, to a theater near you. All You Need is Kill is set to be adapted from a graphic novel of the same name by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, and the story sees Cruise’s character caught in a Groundhog Day-type time loop where he lives the same day over and over again, but with a slight twist. Okay, maybe not so slight, the twist is that the day he’s living over and over again is one where he’s battling space aliens for the very survival of the planet. Every day he goes to battle, every day he dies, and every morning he wakes up anew. Until the 158th time he gives it a go, and he meets a character called (at least in the comic) The Bitch of War, who changes everything. Sounds crazy.

When I first read on Empire that Alexander Payne was looking at a project called Wilson for his next film, I thought to myself that finally, finally somebody was going to take a long overdue deeper look at the always obscured, wisdom filled neighbor from Home Improvement. But then I read a little further and realized that’s not what this project is going to be at all. I was disappointed. But then I read a little further and realized that what this project is could be even better. “Wilson” is a graphic novel created by Daniel Clowes, who film fans will probably recognize as being the guy who wrote “Ghost World,” another comic that went on to become a Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi-starring feature film. That film was much loved, so much so that the Clowes and Terry Zwigoff penned screenplay was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar at The Academy Awards that year. Seeing as Clowes is once again working on the adaptation for this project, and Ghost World had a dry, biting sense of humor that seems to fit very well with Payne’s sensibilities, it looks like this could be a project to watch.

After successfully bulking up enough to trade blows and dialogue with Tom Hardy in the recent fight film Warrior, Australian actor Joel Edgerton has proven that he can pretty much do anything. And after starring in another recent, high profile Hollywood film, the remake of The Thing, he has shown that he’s an actor whose star power is on the rise. So it makes sense to me that Warner Bros. and director Noam Murro would be looking at him to fill Gerard Butler’s shoes as the star of a 300 movie. According to Vulture, Edgerton is in talks to join Murro’s 300 sequel/prequel Battle of Artemisia as the lead badass Themistocles. Themistocles was an Athenian general and politician who is mostly remembered for leading the Athenian Navy in a successful campaign to beat back a Persian invasion. After his military exploits, he stuck around Athens as a bigwig politician, but eventually rubbed a lot of people the wrong way because of his arrogance. Also, he rubbed the Spartans the wrong way because of his insistence that Athens be refortified. Once he was eventually ostracized from Athens, he had nowhere else to go in Greece – he had pissed pretty much everyone off. What choice did that leave him? It meant that, in a stunning bit of irony, he had to flee to Persia and work in service of their king.

Hard Candy director David Slade has been said to be the guy Fox has hired to direct a reboot of its Daredevil franchise, but according to a recent report by Variety, rethinking the adventures of blind vigilante Matt Murdoch isn’t the only comics-to-film work that the director has on his plate. Apparently he has also been chosen to direct a film called Coward, which is the initial storyline that kicked off the first five issues of the comic book “Criminal”. The exciting part of this news, apart from the fact that Slade is working on something new outside of the Twilight franchise, is that “Criminal” was a smaller book done by Ed Brubaker, who is one of the best comic book writers of the last ten years. Apart from his smaller original works like the “Criminal” books, Brubaker has had legendary runs on books set in the Batman universe, “Captain America”, and even Slade’s other upcoming adaptation “Daredevil”. Coward tells the story of a pickpocket and master thief named Leo. It’s the typical professional with a set of rules who takes one risky job and has everything blow up in his face storyline, but it’s also really cool and seems like it would be easily adaptable to film. Brubaker himself has written the screenplay, which is why I’m so interested to see how this one turns out. I think that his writing and Slade’s directorial eye could prove to be a great match, and if this one works out then [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Now that the L.A. portion of shooting for Christopher Nolan’s third Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises is finishing up, the production is packing up and getting ready to head out to New York City. And according to 24 Frames, someone working on the the film who has access to the actors’ schedules says that those in the movie have been briefed that while in New York they may be filming scenes that take place at the Occupy Wall Street protests. What sort of craziness is this? Well apparently there are scenes of civil unrest in TDKR and instead of going through the trouble of making his own, fake protests, Nolan would like to see if he could add some authenticity to his film by using a real street movement as a backdrop. Everything that TDKR is actually doing is, of course, super secret. The movie doesn’t even film under its own name, it films under the code name “Magnus Rex,” so whether any of this talk about protest shooting is real or not is hard to confirm. This news is coming from one source that has contacted the L.A. Times, so to believe is to have faith in them. If shooting that takes place at the protests actually does become a reality, it’s interesting to imagine how the social movement would respond to having a big Hollywood production in their midst. Would they see the movie industry as a tool of corporate greed and try to disrupt the shootings? [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

During a little sit down meeting of the minds with MTV, Hugh Jackman and one of MTV’s interviewers talked turkey about the upcoming X-Men spinoff The e and what sort of rating Jackman and director James Mangold would be shooting for. The big, headline grabbing news is that there is actually talk of an R-rated Wolverine on the table. During their discussions, Jackman and Mangold have acknowledged that, “There’s such great temptation to make an R-rated Wolverine. I’ve always felt that. I know a lot of fans would like that. I totally get it. If there was ever a superhero that was going to be R-rated, it’s Wolverine.” These are going to be exciting words to hear for a lot of comic book fans, and many will probably come away from the interview spreading the word that an R-rated The Wolverine might happen, but I’d like to throw some cold water on that. When speaking further on the subject Jackman says that the problem with making an R-rated superhero movie is that, “In the last ten years I’ve also met many 12, 13, dare I say 10, 14, 15-year-olds, who for them Wolverine is not just cool, you see it in their eyes, he’s everything to them … you’d need to have a really good reason to exclude those fans.” Despite the quality of the reason I just don’t think there is any way that any studio anywhere would ever exclude the teen and tween crowd from a Wolverine movie. [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Work on getting a Thor sequel in production seems to be well underway. It was just yesterday the news broke that Monster director Patty Jenkins was getting looked at very closely to direct the hammer-wielding god’s second movie, and now Entertainment Weekly has some quotes from Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige about what direction the plot will take. Once this sequel goes into production, Thor will already have furthered adventures here on Earth alongside his Avengers buddies, so according to Feige, it’s time to “take Thor literally to other worlds.” In the Norse mythology that Thor plays around in there are nine different worlds. When I looked up the nine worlds over at Marvel, I learned that three of them share the same planet as Thor’s home Asgard, one of them is where we live (Midgard), and the other four are called Jotunheim, Svartalfheim, Hel, and Muspelheim. That’s a whole mouthful of words, and a whole heap of worlds full of elves, demons, and who knows what for Thor to smash with his hammer.

It’s been quite a while since it was announced that saucy young actress Juno Temple would be appearing in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming and omnipresent The Dark Knight Rises. But other than the fact that she would be playing a “street smart Gotham girl”, nobody has been able to dig up the specifics of exactly who her character is, and if she would be somebody who has already appeared in the Batman mythos. Of course, when absolutely anything about a highly anticipated comic book movie is left unclear, speculation often runs rampant. Would she be the “The Dark Knight Returns” version of Robin, Carrie Kelly? Would she be playing the youthful psychologist turned clown-faced wacko, Harley Quinn? It turns out, no. Total Film seems to think they have a scoop on the role Temple is filling, and it’s that of sometime Catwoman sidekick Holly Robinson.

There were a lot of things that I liked about Captain America: The First Avenger, but my biggest disappointment with the film was that we didn’t get nearly enough time spent with Cap battling the Red Skull and his crazy group of science driven terrorists. It felt like 90% of the film was all setup and then we got the action in a 10-minute montage. That’s why I’m super pumped to hear Captain America co-writer Christopher Markus tell Hero Complex that he’s got some crazy, Cap battling science ideas for the sequel. Markus starts off the crazy by saying, “I love MODOK and I think you could make a terrifying movie with MODOK but nobody seems to be on my side at the momentum [sic].” For those of you not comic book savvy, MODOK is one of the most ludicrous villains with a long time publishing history. He’s basically a giant head inside of a metal helmet that has little metal arms and legs dangling off of it. He started off as a guy named George Tarleton who got experimented on by the Advanced Idea Mechanics (or AIM) and turned into a living computer named MODOC (or Mental Organism Designed Only for Computing). Tarleton had other ideas though. Despite the fact that he was designed for computing, that wasn’t exactly what he intended on doing; so he killed his creators, took control of AIM, and renamed himself MODOK (or Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing). Why would a character so ridiculous have a long [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Gwen is on a bit of a vacation this week, so I’m taking over writing duties for the one column on the site that forces us to ogle and think deeply at the same time. Hopefully I do it justice. Hopping into a cinematic time machine to set a film in a different decade is always a precarious occupation, but for X-Men: First Class (a movie that doesn’t seem exactly topical despite coming out two months ago), the danger of portraying the men and women of 1962 was even more difficult. Sure, Mad Men had come along and made the sleek chauvinism of the 60s chic again, but Matthew Vaughn and company had to juggle the suspension of disbelief inherent in spotlighting mutants alongside the possible cartoon that forms whenever a guy in a tight cummerbund slaps a woman on the ass and goes back to enjoying being white and male in America. So is X-Men: First Class anti-feminist or a sexy love note to the powerful women of our world? That’s a tough call. And since it’s a tough call, here’s an attempt at giving both arguments equal weight.

In the newest edition of Entertainment Weekly, Andrew Garfield is keen to point out that his work in the new Amazing Spider-Man isn’t a “replacement” for the work done by Tobey Maguire even though, by definition, it is. While Sony won’t be scouring the world destroying copies of the other movies, Garfield is undoubtedly the new face of the franchise. That status was made official with the first look at his character  in action – perched on a subway train ceiling, clinging to Emma Stone while shirtless and staring over his shoulder dramatically. Ladies and gentlemen, here’s your new Spider-Man:

So pleased they were with the performance of the first, they’ve decided to make another. Disney and Marvel Studios have set a release date for Thor 2, a sequel to this summer’s Kenneth Branagh directed, Chris Hemsworth starring superhero film. Usually when a sequel to a comic book movie gets announced, it’s immediately time to start speculating on what’s going to happen in the next one. With Thor 2, however, things are a little bit more complicated. Before this movie ever happens, the Thor and Loki characters are already set to appear in Joss Whedon’s upcoming Avengers, so the people in charge of writing Thor 2 are going to have to make sure that what they do jives with the characters’ appearances there. And we’re going to have to wait to see it before really going wild with theories on what’s next for the Odinson.