What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie collection of links, posters, videos, and other newsworthy mediums that mostly have to do with movies. Sometimes we mix in a bit of television. Other times we’re talking about something completely different. Call us unfocused if you must, but don’t you ever call us boring. Leading with a photo of Katy Perry, not my finest moment. Rest assured, though, as there is some actual movie news associated with the buxom pop singer picture above. Paramount Pictures — the studio that brought you the box office cow Justin Bieber: Never Say Never – is planning a Katy Perry 3D movie documentary concert film thing. Squee!

Although the real question keeping Hollywood awake in 2012 is “Does Winston Wolf clean up dead hookers on Yom Kippur?”, the fine folks over at HitFix have put forth a handful of queries of varying importance which filmmakers, studios and fans might have on their minds this year. It’s their 15 Questions Keeping Hollywood Awake in 2012. With concerns from Lindsay Lohan’s possible last chance to Joss Whedon’s first real shot with The Avengers, it’s an intriguing list that might prove 2012 to be both an endlessly fascinating and completely irrelevant year in the stories behind the movies. Will Smith, Found Footage, Hunger Games, Dark Knight Rises and more. HitFix has questions, and here are the answers:

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column born exactly one year ago today. And it’s very happy to still be around and well on its way to taking over the planet. It is convinced that it will have a very productive 2012 in that area, especially once humanity’s reign of terror ends later this year. In the mean time, it would like to thank you all for reading. Now enough of that mushy stuff, lets do the news. We begin this evening with an image of biker Jemaine Clement in Men in Black III. He’s playing an alien biker who turns out to be the villain in this time-traveling storyline…. And we wonder why that movie has had so many production problems? Either way, I’ll watch Jemaine Clement eat soap if I have to, as that guy is quite funny.

Despite not coming with a cool rap video, the new teaser trailer for Men in Black III does everything right. It opens with the familiar faces of Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith doing what they did in the previous movies, then quickly shifts to the high concept problem (and solution) of a missing K (and a trip through time that randomly involves a Hollywood-style stunt to work. Then again, jumping off buildings is all the rage these days. As a bonus, both Smith and new co-star Josh Brolin get to deliver a bright ray of sunshine known as the Tommy Lee Jones Signature Smile. Check it out for yourself:

As the number of 3D  movies has ramped up over the past few years, have you ever had the feeling that you were getting away with something by only paying three or four dollars more for a 3D movie? Yeah, me either. Adding on about a third of the price of a regular ticket seems more than fair for just adding one more dimension, but the studios’ bottom line doesn’t agree. You see, it costs a movie studio an upwards of $10m to furnish theaters with the 3D glasses they need for a big tentpole 3D release, and with box office sales of 3D movies dropping like stones over the past several months, they’re starting to think that $10m isn’t worth it in the long run. So what are they going to do about it? Stop making 3D movies because the cost of production isn’t meeting the demand for the product? No, stupid! They’re going to raise the price of a 3D ticket even further so that we can pay for our own glasses. Or at least, this is the step that Sony Pictures is taking. In a letter sent out to exhibitors, the studio said they will no longer be covering the cost of the glasses for their upcoming 3D films like Men in Black III and The Amazing Spider-Man, and that theaters would have to take it upon themselves to sell glasses to the consumer. This will probably hash out to about another 50 cents a ticket, unless theater owners [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]

This may shock some of you dear readers, but this year I decided to skip the Breaking Dawn panel and instead went with the Rick Baker retrospective panel. Getting to hear Baker talk at great length aside, it was a fun surprise getting to see his work for Men in Black III because of how exciting the glimpses were. The retro aliens that Baker designed looked fantastic. Whether the movie works or not, his contributions will be more memorable entries in his speaks-for-itself body of work. We all know the current buzz and rumors regarding MIB: III, but as Baker says below, its production is simply the way you make movies now. What’s going on with that film isn’t drastically different from most tent-pole releases, even the good ones. Before the retrospective panel, I got a few minutes to chat with the make-up effects guru on the matter. Here’s what Rick Baker had to say about copying the greats as a kid, acting like a schoolboy with David Byrne, and the difficulty of working on modern blockbusters:

You get off a plane that’s hopefully been screaming-baby-free and emerge into sunshine and sea air. After a brief cab ride toward the water’s edge, you feel the shadow of the San Diego Convention Center blanket you in its strangely warm glow. The giant banners for movies have already taken over entire buildings, and people are already lined up to get badges (and to get into the Twilight panel the next day). This is Comic-Con. There are friends to meet up/catch up with and food to grab (since the screaming baby on your plane drooled all over your bagel), but nothing really starts going until the evening when the doors are opened for Preview Night. Now, it was pretty clear last year, but this year sealed it. “Preview Night” should just be called “Day One.” When you have 20,000 people crammed into a building, the event you’re gearing up for has already started.

What is Movie News After Dark? This is a question that I am almost never asked, but I will answer it for you anyway. Movie News After Dark is FSR’s late-night secretion, a column dedicated to all of the news stories that slip past our daytime editorial staff and make it into my curiously chubby RSS ‘flagged’ box. It will (but is not guaranteed to) include relevant movie news, links to insightful commentary and other film-related shenanigans. I may also throw in a link to something TV-related here or there. It will also serve as my place of record for being both charming and sharp-witted, but most likely I will be neither of the two. I write this stuff late at night, what do you expect?

What is Movie News After Dark? This is a question that I am almost never asked, but I will answer it for you anyway. Movie News After Dark is FSR’s newest late-night secretion, a column dedicated to all of the news stories that slip past our daytime editorial staff and make it into my curiously chubby RSS ‘flagged’ box. It will (but is not guaranteed to) include relevant movie news, links to insightful commentary and other film-related shenanigans. I may also throw in a link to something TV-related here or there. It will also serve as my place of record for being both charming and sharp-witted, but most likely I will be neither of the two. I write this stuff late at night, what do you expect?

If there’s one thing the Men in Black franchise has done, it has certainly convinced a few legit actors to play villains. So the fact that Flight of the Conchords star Jemaine Clement is in talks to play the villain in Men in Black III shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

Apparently Tommy Lee Jones isn’t actually too old for this shit.

Instead of plugging in other disaster movies into the formula, Roland Emmerich is finally being blunt about his desperate need to make more ID4.

This isn’t an April Fool’s Joke. It’s for real, and now we’re asking whether it should be a reality or not. Are you thinking Yes or Aw Hell Naw?

His new film will feature a secret government group in charge of keeping the Earth safe from alien invasion. Sound familiar? We didn’t think so, either.