I didn’t think it was possible for me to be any more excited about P.T. Anderson’s upcoming religious drama that was at one point called The Master. First off, Anderson is one of my very favorite directors, so anything he does is going to excite me. Secondly, Philip Seymour Hoffman is starring as the L. Ron Hubbard stand-in who serves as the main character, and he’s about the best actor on the planet. And third, much like Anderson’s last film, There Will Be Blood, this one is going to feature a score by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood. Last time around that equaled aural awesomeness. But now there’s a new rumor swirling around the project that is almost too cool to believe, and coming from these sources, I’d say it’s pretty dang reliable. Cinema Blend was peeping in on a Twitter conversation between two directors from the Pixar stable, Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton, about movies being shot in 65mm, and they uncovered the tidbit that Anderson is going to be the next director to utilize the format. Somewhere in the thread of the conversation Bird said to Stanton, “ … Nolan shot a lot of Dark Knight Rises in IMAX. I think PT Anderson’s next is 65 too.” To which Stanton replied, “The Master is indeed in 65. They nearly lost a camera shooting in the Bay.”

Remember Avatar Day? Remember having to procure tickets for what was essentially an extended trailer? Remember feeling really strange about going to a movie theater for a less-than-twenty-minute presentation? Oh, well, me either, because I didn’t do any of those things, but let’s work from the same sort of frame of mind, but with an actual film attached. Our friends over at /Film are reporting an exclusive tip that Warner Bros. is attaching a six-minute “prologue” for The Dark Knight Rises to all IMAX prints of Paramount’s upcoming Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol release. Though the films are coming from different studios, should this prove to be true, such a slice of marketing mayhem will no doubt push interested moviegoers and fans of the Batman to check out the Brad Bird-helmed franchise entry in the IMAX format. Paramount is already making a to-do of their film’s IMAX release, putting that version in theaters on December 16, five days before the film hits regular theaters on December 21. Both Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and The Dark Knight Rises will feature “extensive scenes” shot for IMAX, so this may prove to be the holiday season’s best pairing (beyond egg nog and whiskey). Warner Bros. has declined to comment on the story to /Film, but the team over there has gathered a couple of other sources that confirm it. Will this drive you to check out Ghost Protocol in IMAX? And just what the heck do they mean by “prologue”? Aren’t two previous films [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]

In the least shocking move of possibly the entire summer season, Paramount has announced that they are re-releasing Michael Bay’s opus, Transformers: Dark of the Moon (or as I call it, Trannies: Pink Floyd Kinda), back into IMAX theaters for an extended two-week run. No less than 246 IMAX theaters that previously thought themselves free from the metallic clang-clangs of robots and the screams of innocents piercing through their giant speakers and splashed on their giant screens will be subjected to the bloodshed (oilshed?) all over again, for yet another two weeks. The re-release kicks off this Friday, August 26, and will run until Thursday, September 8. The film has already grossed over one billion dollars in the worldwide box office, with just $59.6m of that coming thanks to IMAX. With the re-release of the film to IMAX 3D, that number will be jacked up exponentially, guaranteeing that audiences who previously missed (avoided?) the spectacle have no excuse to not see robots and humans going at it on a screen taller than most people’s homes. Optimus!! Buuuumblebeeee! There are currently three films playing in IMAX: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, Cowboys & Aliens, and Final Destination 5: More Final-er. With the next new IMAX film opening not set until September 9 (that would be Contagion), Potter nearing the end of its run, and Cowboys underperforming, it’s no surprise that IMAX would push out a proven winner to end the summer strong. Now, who do I talk [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]

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that will soon be shot almost exclusively in IMAX. What this means for you is that you’ll need to get a bigger monitor, as this column will only appear to those whose monitors are at least 70 feet tall. We feel that’s the only way to read it. We promise to make it worth your while. According to a handy press release from Warner Bros., we can now confirm that production has begun on Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. For those who have not heard of this project, it’s the third in Nolan’s somewhat popular series of Batman movies. But wait, there’s more: “Christopher Nolan is utilizing IMAX® cameras even more extensively than he did on The Dark Knight, which had marked the first time ever that a major feature film was partially shot with IMAX® cameras.” Oh yes!

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr spends a long day in the multiplex, checking out a variety of films from alcoholic romantic comedies to nature documentaries with elephants and orangutans. He drinks himself silly and hits on Greta Gerwig in Arthur, narrowly escapes being killed by ass-kicking teen assassin Hanna, narrowly escapes getting his arm bitten off by a tiger shark in Soul Surfer and peeps in on Natalie Portman undressing for a swim in Your Highness. Too bad she’s pregnant now, ‘cause Kevin just ain’t into that scene.

Born to Be Wild 3D is standard scientific IMAX fare that trades on an indisputable fact: Ecologically friendly movies about cute animals are just about impossible to resist. That’s even more pronouncedly the case when they unfold across settings as exotically picturesque as the wilds of Kenya and Borneo, with sweeping helicopter shots of the savanna and jungles molded to close-ups of the sweet, sad faces of orphaned orangutans and elephants. Throw in the honey tones of Morgan Freeman’s soothing narrative diction and keep things to an astoundingly brisk 40 minutes and you’ve got a recipe for success, albeit of the sort that’s best seen as a companion to a larger trip (a zoo or science center visit, for example) than a destination in itself.

Mars Needs Moms is an awesome display of computer animation molded to a standard Disney story template. The soppy moralizing about families and the sanctity of the mother-son bond would be far more difficult to take were it not in the service of some awe-inspiring 3-D work that offers a richly textured, luxuriously detailed vision of life on Mars. I’m no great fan of the artificial incorporation of the third dimension, but Disney’s animators have used here it to produce a veritable theme park ride rendition of a Mars featuring enormous ships, complex technological apparatuses and cavernous loading docks given a sleek, space-age sheen. Director Simon Wells’ stylistic vision might best be described as steam-punk mixed with Kubrick, far more complex and immersive than anything this side of Pixar.

Paramount Pictures and IMAX have made a business agreement with each other (heretofore known as “the contract”) that will see four Paramount flicks splayed out on those giant canvas-like screens the kids love so much. Those four films? No surprises there. Except maybe one. Transformers: Dark of the Moon and The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn will be converted into the IMAX format (which I assume means completely) so that the explosions and computer generated dogs can be seen with crystal clarity. J.J. Abrams’s mysterious Super 8 will also be at IMAX theaters, but even they aren’t releasing how it’s being shot or whether the entire film or just a few segments will be formatted to be size extra enormous. The one semi-surprise is Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, which will have several of its sequences converted, but won’t be entirely in IMAX.

Audiences got derezzed, went into the grid, and disc warred all the way to end of line this weekend. And, if you followed all of that, you were probably among the masses. While TRON Legacy jumped to the top of the pile, its weekend take wasn’t up to expectations, and the future of the franchise could very well be called into question. It just depends on the legs the film has, Olive Wilde’s legs notwithstanding.

The new champion of the people, cinematographer par example Wally Pfister is fresh off of Inception and ready to leap into action with the heaviest cameras possible for Batman 3. As a true champion of the people, he doesn’t want to do the film in 3D (most likely because it’s a gimmick that will die out of its current fad phase any year now (our words, not his)). However, Pfister did call 3D “phony” during a recent interview and went on to claim that he wants to do the entirety of Batman 3 in beautiful, soaring IMAX. Considering the limitations of the camera, this would be a great challenge for the crew, but with great challenges come great responsibility or something, and, Holy Hell, just do it already. The IMAX scenes from The Dark Knight are outstanding, and seeing a full movie that way would shove a glasses-less reality into audience’s faces. [Collider]

You have almost a year to get your wallet ready.

Few directors have a knack for maintaining the mystery these days. Few directors keep the mystery like Christopher Nolan, and its what makes Inception so interesting.

It seems like a foregone conclusion, but now we have official word. Marvel Studios and Paramount Pictures will distribute Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2 in IMAX theaters simultaneously with the film’s release on May 7, 2010.

Space nerds, mount up. Previously I’ve blogged incessant rants of love in the direction of space, and the documentaries that have chronicled our journeys there. This is no exception.

This past weekend, James Cameron’s Avatar opened big — not Twilight big, but big nonetheless. And just like Cameron’s last film Titanic, experts predict that it will have staying power, adding quite a few dollars (and maybe a decimal place) to the $232 million that it brought in worldwide in its first three days.

The IMAX Corporation announced today that they will be distributing The Twilight Saga: Eclipse in their gigantic-screen format. This of course, is exactly what fans of the franchise have been yearning for: to see Edward sparkle in glorious IMAX.

Columbia Pictures and the IMAX Corporation are press releasing this morning, letting us know that they will be releasing Spider-Man 4 on May 5, 2011 on the biggest of the big screen formats.

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we invite Fat Guy Kevin Carr to give his opinion on a truly horrific weekend of bad releases. Also, we talk about the movies that came out.

If you are both a subscriber to Empire magazine (which you should be) and someone who is excited about James Cameron’s upcoming film Avatar (which is debatable), you are in for a treat.

Not a month goes by that we aren’t reminded that another Batman movie isn’t in the works. Only this time, the rumors are just too much — it is time to fight back.