I tease, of course. The Avengers is almost guaranteed to be a gigantic hit this summer and probably one of the year’s highest grossers. The film has a built-in audience by virtue of its characters, history and the intentionally structured universe that Marvel has created with the earlier films. It’s going to be huge thanks to the presence of Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo/CGI) and others. And it’s going to be fun thanks to Joss Whedon in the director’s chair. But will it be any good? All signs point to yes, and that’s including the new TV spot below.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that frankly doesn’t have much to say this evening. So it’s all good stuff. Quality over Quantity and whatnot. We begin tonight with a new image from The Avengers, as published by Marvel.com in a new batch of images from the highly anticipated film. In this one, Nick Fury, as played by Samuel L. Jackson, has some gnarly eye scarring going on. As if that guy needed to look more like a badass.

It’s always refreshing to hear a filmmaker talk candidly about the concerns and difficulties of creating something as large as, say, a blockbuster comic book movie that’s expected to draw in millions of fans and even more millions of dollars. Today’s burst of honesty comes from The Avengers director Joss Whedon, who told Empire Magazine (via Comic Book Movie) a ton about the project. Check out the link for more. The money quote: “It was an up-all-month job. Finding the characters’ voices was not only easy, but glorious fun. It doesn’t suck to write Tony Stark, yet finding the structure was just brutal. I haven’t had that much trouble making a screenplay work since Serenity and, embarrassingly, for the exact same reason: there’s just too many characters.” It’s fair to say that’s also a concern for fans, but it’s less that there are so many characters and more that there are so many massive, super-powered, enlarged egos in the film. How do you give them all space to shine brightly? Fortunately, the best reason to be optimistic that Whedon stuck the landing with the script is his work on “The Astonishing X-Men,” a comic book series that might just be the best X-Men storyline in Marvel‘s catalog. If the man can handle that universe and that many larger-than-life characters, it seems reasonable he can do it in the condensed format of film. It’s also fantastic to see him talk about how much fun he had crafting the heroes. Joss Whedon [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]

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 that, tonight, is focused on a cornacopia of new Blu-ray release information. From James Bond to Jake Gittes, it’s going to be a beautiful year of high definition goodness. There is also non-Blu-ray news, for those who like variety. We begin tonight with a look at the box for Bond 50, the upcoming release of the Golden Anniversary Blu-ray edition of all 22 James Bond films on Blu-ray for the first time as one complete offering. MGM and Fox laid out plans at CES today, which included making it available for pre-order right now. Put simply, it’s beautiful. They even delivered a trailer, which I’ve included after the jump.

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.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie and entertainment news column that, now that it’s a year old and feeling mature, is looking to bring you only the best links of the day. Think of it as your one-stop-shop for the best of the entertainment web. If you didn’t see it here, it probably wasn’t that good. If we missed it, just email it to neil@filmschoolrejects.com and we’ll consider it for tomorrow. We do this every night. We begin tonight with a new shot of Emma Stone in The Amazing Spider-Man as a funeral-going Gwen Stacy. She’s looking quite sad. I wonder who died. Oh right, they are telling the origin story of Spider-Man again. I know who’s going to die.

It’s already the second day of 2012, which means we’ll all be sober within the next day or two. It also means that we can officially start looking (through blurry eyes) ahead to the future. A future of promise and potential. A future of hope. A future of tingling anticipation that the road stretched out in front of us that leads to the cinema will be paved with gold. Will there be piles of excrement along the way? Of course, but we don’t know how many or how badly they’ll tarnish our yellow-bricked roller coaster ride. All we can see from this far out is the shimmering wonder of movies to come – the vast unknown that looks wonderful (and might just live up to the hype). In past years (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011), we’ve gone with a fairly arbitrary count of 20-30 movies. This year, we decided to prove that there were 52 movies worth prematurely celebrating (even though what we found were many more). That’s one for every week (even if there are some weeks with a few and some weeks with none at all). Regardless of the number, Rob Hunter, Neil Miller, Kate Erbland, Allison Loring, Landon Palmer, Brian Salisbury and Cole Abaius have joined forces to remind us all that there are a lot of great movies to hope for this year. Go grab a calendar and pencil in everything that gets your blood pressure up toward unsafe levels. It’s going to be a busy, flick-filled [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]

Since moving to Germany, I’ve gotten used to watching movies overdubbed in Deutsch (last night was Charlie und die Schokoladenfabrik). Still, there’s no amount of dubbing that could prepare me for hearing Samuel L. Jackson say “We get ready,” in a deep, Russian baritone. Мы получаем готовый! The Russian trailer for The Avengers is essentially the same one from our shores, but they shine a bigger spotlight on Black Widow (which means extended footage of Scarlett Johansson looking like an ice-veined killer in black latex while explosions happen all over the place. It’s no surprise they’d treat native daughter, and former KGB operative, Natasha Romanoff with such respect. Now check it out for yourself:

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column desperate in its search for the insanely cool links of the day. It will also take movie related news, things about Community and Doctor Who, as well as, on occasion, updates on The Dark Knight Rises. Although after last night’s entry, it’s not sure there is any TDKR news left to report. We begin tonight with some incredibly cool animated work from an artist named Otis Frampton. On his Deviant Art page, found via Popped Culture, he envisions what a Battlestar Galactica animated series would look like. I would watch this show, and not just because I’m a die hard BSG fan, either.

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.

What is Movie News After Dark? Every night, it brings to you a collection of movie and pop culture news that will thrill you, chill you and if you’re not careful, spill you all over the floor. Tonight it takes on a new look — instead of the usual news-news-news-poster-news-news-news-video format, it’s almost all movie posters We begin this evening with a shot of Wonder Woman giving herself a breast exam. Earlier this week, someone told me that my nightly meanderings through the world of pop culture news needed to be sexier. What could be sexier than the fight against breast cancer? Nobody’s immune, people.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly collection of things, movie related and otherwise, that will entertain you, astound you and most likely give you that much needed late-night push toward deep, restful sleep. We begin tonight with the new logo Paramount Pictures has released for their 100th anniversary celebration. I caught it this evening on a massive IMAX screen in front of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, which was quite awesome. But more on that later. Up first, some trivia: Did you know that the original Paramount mountain was based on a doodle by W.W. Hodkinson and that the live-action logo is based on Peru’s Artesonraju? Wikipedia did.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that is currently incensed with its own author, as it has determined that he is a giant wuss. Seriously? You almost let a little stomach bug get in the way of doing the news?! Pansy. Now, on with the good stuff. The shortlist for the Best Foreign Language Oscar has been released. Among the contenders listed in notes from Jeff Wells is Bullhead, a recent pickup of Drafthouse Films and standout film of this year’s Fantastic Fest line-up. Our own Luke Mullen called it “damn near a masterpiece.” That’s high praise, if I’ve ever seen it.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that melts in your mouth, not in your hand. It also delivers a taste that doesn’t linger. Because we know you need to sleep soon, and we don’t want to disrupt such an important ritual. Lets be honest with ourselves for a moment. Even though we know that it will be a kindred spirit of Zack Snyder’s 300, we still can’t escape from the fact that Tarsem Singh’s The Immortals looks pretty badass. The evidence of this is all over the place, most notably in a new gallery of Immortals images over at Screen Rant. Tonight’s lead image features Theseus, the hero, vs. a Minotaur. I’ll watch that.

The sixth annual New York Comic-Con was host to its largest audience to date at over 100,000 people. And it’s thanks to that audience the convention got to deliver on some of the biggest events of the year in the world of geekdom. With the massive weekend now over, we take a look back the five biggest things that came out of NYCC 2011.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly celebration of what’s happening in the world of entertainment. It also usually manages to get in a few zingers. We begin tonight with an image of Wei Tang, an actress you may recognize as the gal who had a lot of sex with Tony Leung in that Ang Lee movie, Lust, Caution. She’s also a talented actress. Which is why she’s on the shortlist of actresses who could play the Asian Bond girl role in Bond 23, which is now rumored to be partially shooting in China.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that has no problem closing out another fine week of coverage. Why? Because it’s got a hot and heavy weekend planned with its new girlfriend, Siri. It even used her to book a quality hotel, make restaurant reservations and order adult party props. You know, just in case she’s into that sort of thing. We open this fine, crisp Friday evening with a shot of Ecto-1, the vehicle driven by everyone’s favorite guys to call if you is, in fact, afraid of some ghosts. It was captured by our friends at Primer Magazine at the Arclight in Los Angeles in celebration of Ghostbusters returning to theaters. It’s one of four original production cars used in the films, fully restored to its former glory. And glorious, it is.

Comic-Con. A place of joy. A place of wonder. A place of really awesome costumes. Thursday marked the start of New York Comic-Con 2011. Not nearly as land mark as SDCC (which some would say is a benefit), but certainly not at the bottom of the scrap heap. In a city bustling with the creative minds from all walks of life, it would only make sense that once a year, those creative minds come together for one giant weekend of awesomeness. And we’re here to bring you all of it.

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we talk with Lucky McKee about his disturbing new horror film The Woman. Plus, we launch a new feature for the month of October where horror filmmakers discuss a favorite horror film. This week, A Horrible Way To Die and You’re Next writer Simon Barrett praises an obscure modern classic. As if that weren’t enough, FSR Associate Editor Rob Hunter goes mano a mano with Film.com‘s Eric D. Snider in a test of wits and movie news acumen. Download This Episode