Look, everyone. Let’s be honest. From here on out it’s going to be all The Dark Knight Rises, all the time. A few foreign films might slip into the mix, and some sort of Asian Film Festival in New York might end up on the radar, but for the most part everyone will be writing about Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming trilogy cap forever and ever and ever for the next two weeks. That being said, Wired has crafted a must-read article on how Nolan’s vision has been brought to masterful life. It features Nolan, co-writer Jonathan Nolan, and the stars of the film weighing in on various aspects of production, but the most interesting note might be where the story was really born from: Dickensian England. Jonathan Nolan claims that the goal was to see Gotham truly destroyed, and the best place to look for a story of total. shocking destruction in a modern city was the classic you were forced to read in high school, ”A Tale of Two Cities.” 

As Tom Hardy’s star power increases, so does the anticipation for George Miller’s new Mad Max movie, Mad Max: Fury Road. What with Mel Gibson being something of a touchy subject these days, is there any other actor out there who would be more fun to watch battling weirdos in crazy outfits over gasoline in the desert? Fury Road is a film that’s been plagued with all sorts of disasters and delays over the course of its pre-production though, and sometimes it’s felt like we’re never going to get our chance to see Hardy rev up his engines and do his thing. Well, there’s good news and bad news regarding the film’s production. After experiencing weather related problems with its original location – Broken Hill, Australia – Fury Road has been moved to the African nation of Namibia, where Hardy and crew are currently shooting. That’s the good news. The bad news is, despite Miller’s early insistence that the film was going to be shot with 3D cameras, that’s no longer going to be the case. Any plans to shoot natively in 3D have been scrapped in lieu of using a mix of ALEXA, Canon, and Olympus digital cameras.

Christopher Nolan‘s third and final Batman film hits theaters this summer, and it promises to be huge in pretty much every way. It’s all but guaranteed to be one of the year’s highest grossers, and fans are equally assured to eat it up like Trader Joe’s Speculoos Cookie Butter. The film opens eight years after Batman (Christian Bale) took the fall for Harvey Dent’s crimes at the end of The Dark Knight and sees a new master criminal in the form of the terrorist Bane (Tom Hardy). He’s forced back into the spotlight to protect the city, but by the looks of things he may not fare that well in his first face-off with the muscular, muffled Bane. Early teasers have underwhelmed some viewers, but WB has just released their final full-length trailer, and it’s loaded with new scenes of action, scale and a real sense of finality. There are some genuine chill-inducing moments here that not even the appearance of Anne Hathaway as Catwoman can ruin. (I still don’t see how her presence here turns out okay. And by ‘her’ I mean both the actress and the character.) Check out the new trailer below.

The MTV Movie Awards are good for two things: pouring slime on people and premiering footage from highly anticipated, forthcoming movies. Plus, one of those things is done by the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards, so you do the math. Fortunately, there’s no difficult math involved in this amazing Dark Knight Rises footage that came as part of the Twilight/Hunger Games worshiping ceremony. It features a difficult conversation between Anne Hathaway‘s Catwoman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt‘s policeman surrounded by explosive images, crowded fight scenes, and a dire warning. Check it out for yourself:

Last year’s Cannes Film Festival featured this year’s Oscar winning Best Actor performance thanks to the inclusion of the wonderful The Artist in competition, and though the films seem to have been chosen for their artistry and provocative subtexts more than any really commercial pointers (as always happens the year after the festival is deemed “too commercial”), there have been some seriously fine performances this year as well. There wasn’t an Uggy this year, but there was a murdered pooch in Moonrise Kingdom, a bitey Killer Whale in Rust & Bone, and a striking performance from an armadillo in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Me and You, so we’ll have to wait and see who emerges with the best animal performance. Probably won’t come from Madagascar 3 though…so for the time being, let’s stick to the humans.

Two TV spots, new pictures, and banners from The Dark Knight Rises? What else could you ask for in about a day’s time? To make that month and a half wait we have left until the film finally opens a little more tolerable, there’s plenty to chew on and savor here. In usual Christopher Nolan cult fan fashion, it’ll be interesting to see how the fandom dissects the meaning of Joseph Gordon-Levitt “kneeling,” what secret Bruce Wayne and Miranda Tate are “talking” about, or what Selina Kyle is really looking at. These new pictures and posters (courtesy of Empire) don’t give us the answers we need, but some message boards out there will most likely come up with countless theories over the matter. First up, here’s a slew of gritty pics, all featuring nothing but gumdrop smiles and a much needed reminder of Nolan’s undying love for “happy” characters:

There are somewhere around a million reasons to look forward to John Hillcoat’s upcoming movie about Depression-era bootleggers, Lawless. Not the least of which is that it’s got one of the most exciting up-and-coming actors on the planet, Tom Hardy, in a prominent role. Hardy has already proven to be a versatile enough talent, but it’s clear that he’s always at his best when he’s projecting an aura of extreme manliness, and these two new clips from Lawless give us a chance to watch him do just that. In the first his bootlegger character, Forrest Bondurant, is trading some snarky dialogue with the new authority in town who’s been tasked to take him down, as played by Guy Pearce. You see, Pearce’s character is all snooty and from the big city of Chicago, so he thinks he’s going to roll into town and run the joint, and Hardy’s character is from the backwoods and doesn’t get impressed by fancy big talk, so he’s not going to listen to anybody. When they get nose to nose and start poking at each other you could swear that you’re watching a hype video for this year’s Wrestlemania. It’s glorious.

In Lawless, John Hillcoat has almost crafted the perfect modern Western, infusing more explicitly the gangster genre elements that always occur in the genre, but never quite so explicitly. The film follows the Bondurant brothers – Jack (Shia Labeouf), Forrest (Tom Hardy) and Howard (Jason Clarke) – rise as the most famous bootleggers in sun-dried Prohibition-era Virginia, and the government’s attempts to stop them. The government’s chief agent is Guy Pearce‘s Charlie Rakes, a flamboyant looking, but profoundly villainous Special Deputy, let off his leash when the Bondurants, lead by Hardy’s powerhouse Forrest refuse to pay a monthly toll on their illegal activities. While it may sound like an all guns-blazing, epic Prohibition-era Western, the story, adapted well from Matt Bondurant‘s historical novel by Nick Cave (who also once again offers a superlative score) focuses on human stories to add poignancy and depth to the more explosive sequences.

What is Movie News After Dark? It happens nightly. It’s about movies. Sometimes television, too. It’s written by a guy who thinks he’s funny. He is often wrong. We begin this evening with a quick programming note. For the second time in the history of this column, we will be celebrating a week of guest entries. Once again, members of the FSR staff have come forward to pledge their swords to the battle for excellent nightly movie news link-dumps. I will be away doing my usual moving and shaking, while the likes of Nathan Adams, Kevin Carr, Luke Mullen, Kate Erbland and a doubtfully sober Robert Fure will be taking the reigns. I have faith that you will all survive their week of debauchery. I bid you to go with god. Above, Bane reacts to this news in a new image from The Dark Knight Rises.

Along with Cole Abaius, I was quite taken with pure popcorn joy of The Avengers. Walking out of the theater one cannot imagine any blockbuster delivering a level of fun at that caliber. Plenty of moviegoers will come away this weekend thinking that exact sentiment, but then they’ll recall this fantastic final trailer for The Dark Knight Rises that will play before Joss Whedon‘s Marvel pic, and they’ll realize we still have one more superhero epic coming our way. If this eerie and evocative trailer is any indication, it’ll be the epic finale this series and the summer deserves. Take a look at Bruce Wayne “rising” with a far less laughable voice this time around:

Director John Hillcoat’s (The Road) upcoming project tells the tale of a family of Depression-era bootleggers coming under the scrutiny of a crooked and cutthroat authority. It’s adapted from a Matt Bondurant novel called “The Wettest County in the World,” it was once being referred to as The Wettest County, and for some reason it’s now called Lawless – but a movie with this cast by any other name would be just as badass. The film’s first theatrical trailer has hit the net today, thanks to Yahoo! Movies, and for the first time we’re getting a glimpse of just how much fun it is to see all of these actors working together; which is a whole lot of fun indeed. First off, you’ve got Shia LaBeouf, Jason Clarke, and Tom Hardy playing the Bondurant Boys, the bootlegging trio of brothers who are, at least in some way, based off the author of the source material’s real family history. Then you’ve got Gary Oldman playing the big-time crook they’re working for, Guy Pearce playing the corrupt authority figure brought in to make sure they’re either getting shut down or giving the government their required cut of the profits, Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska playing a couple of ladies they become romantically entangled with, and a whole host of grizzled-looking character actors filling out the rest of the cast of backwoods Virginia hillbillies.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s the nightly movie news column that other movie news websites read for tomorrow’s news… Editor’s Note: The original header image from this edition of News After Dark was not for public viewing, as we found out later. We were asked to take it down by Warner Bros. And since we’d rather show you really cool stuff, here’s a Bane art piece by alicexz. We begin this evening with what appears to be a very unhappy Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. It’s another promo image to follow last week’s release of Catwoman’s ass-tacular costume. My guess is that Warner Bros. has simply given up on the marketing of this one, as they seem to be just letting raw materials out. Then again, if you had to follow-up with the incredible marketing campaign behind The Dark Knight, you’d probably throw in the towel, too. Luck for them, everyone is already going to see TDKR. Just because.

In the forthcoming edition of Entertainment Weekly, Tom Hardy gets deep on his dedication to Christopher Nolan, his creative aim in The Dark Knight Rises, that damned voice problem, and the dangerous gamble that they’re taking on the villainous Bane. “It’s a risk, because we could be laughed at—or it could be very fresh and exciting,” says Hardy. As for the voice, he calls for patience – noting that with the benefit of time in the context of the movie will let the audience acclimate to the grumbling sound. It’ll no doubt be a fascinating interview, one that exactly zero people will have to be goaded into reading, but it’s more interesting that the star of one of the most anticipated movies of the year, an inevitable blockbuster that will add even more hundreds of millions of dollars to a billion-dollar franchise, is having to defend and explain substantive creative choices. It’s refreshing actually. This isn’t the same plastic, obvious, big-scale, two-hour commercial for toys; it’s a giant experiment in storytelling (that, granted, has the benefit of a giant safety net earned by past performance). Hopefully Nolan didn’t ask Hardy to wear a bag over his head for nothing.

There’s something incredible about knowing that a movie exists. Especially now. After years – years! – of speculation, glimmers of set photos and vague comments mined for meaning, there is actually something we can all call The Dark Knight Rises. It’s no longer an idea. It’s a reality. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Christopher Nolan showed his first cut of the movie to Warners, which means that it’s a reality that will undoubtedly go through some more edits and some honing, but it’s a real thing nonetheless. What was just a thought turned into words on a page, and now those words have evolved into something physical and dynamic. It’s nothing short of magic.  

Just yesterday we were blessed with a new teaser for Ridley Scott’s upcoming film Prometheus, and it was a glorious event. But that glimpse clocked in at just barely over a minute. Today we get a fresh trailer straight from its premiere at WonderCon where Scott joined Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender and Damon Lindelof in what was most likely the sexiest panel to grace a WonderCon stage since Joel Silver and Hilary Swank previewed The Reaping in 2007. They didn’t take any relevant questions and offered little in the way of more information, but per EW Scott did tease a little something. “If we’re lucky, there will be a second part of this. The film does leave you with some nice big open questions.” Have a seat. Prepare to smile uncontrollably. And check out the new trailer below.

This Means War is, as McG puts it, exactly what you think a McG movie is. It’s as commercial and open as a movie can get, something the director has no shame about. Plenty scoff at the idea of loving the tag of a “populist” filmmaker, not McG. Clearly he sees his films as being more than dumb fun, though, and strives to make sure they’re not that. Films similar to This Means War usually don’t strike audience members as being a “personal” project in some fashion. That doesn’t seem to be the case for McG, as he puts it. This Means War has a scene featuring two of the leads discussing Alfred Hitchock, and you can just feel the director taking the opportunity to talk through his characters. It’s a fanboy touch, and he came off as the most energetic kind in our conversation. Here’s what McG had to say about embracing the title of a populist filmmaker, leaving behind med school for music and film, and reflecting on Terminator Salvation:

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr takes the week off because the studios didn’t screen the new releases anywhere near him. In fact, he was specifically told not to come to one particular screening. And that can’t be a good sign, can it? What else can you expect for the movies in the weeks leading up to the Oscars, ‘cause the new ones in the theaters don’t stand a chance of winning anything next year. To take away the pain of not seeing movies this week, Kevin makes a deal with the devil, selling his soul for the ability to set his skull on fire whenever he sees a bad movie. Unfortunately, the light from said flaming skull got him kicked out of the theater because someone thought he was using his cell phone to pirate the film.

Depending on how you interpret it, This Means War is either another insipid, aggressively convoluted candy-colored flick from that auteur of nothingness McG, or one of the great unrequited male love stories of all time. The portrait of two men who really only have eyes for each other, it’s an aggressively formulaic, borderline nonsensical fantasy about Los Angeles-based CIA studs FDR and Tuck (Chris Pine and Tom Hardy) who fall for a woman named Lauren (Reese Witherspoon) and set out to woo her in an elaborate pissing contest.

What is Movie News After Dark? Tonight it’s the column I’m filling in on as Neil Miller journeys to the mystical, frozen land of Chicago. It’s also a list of links to movie or entertainment related things that I either found interesting, noteworthy, or that involved super famous young girls from the Disney channel. Tonight we begin by getting a glimpse at the second season of HBO’s Game of Thrones. WinterisComing.net has a whole host of pictures from the second season that have reminded me of how much I like the show and reinforced the three reasons why I’m looking forward to new episodes so much: boobs, blood, and Brienne. Hopefully we’ll be getting a lot of each.

It looks like your Valentine’s Day movie-going options might now be limited to The Vow, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, Safe House, and maybe Rampart if you and your significant other are feeling particularly punchy, as Fox has reportedly ditched their plan to open McG‘s This Means War on the 14th (next Tuesday). Deadline Springwood reports that the studio “hasn’t seen the pic’s poor tracking pick up at all in recent days,” pushing the studio to move the picture back to a wide release date on Friday the 17th, though there will be some sneak peeks sticking around on the 14th. What’s the issue? Well, oddly enough, Nikki Finke herself doesn’t seem to get it – her exclusive post on the matter includes lines like “I don’t get what the moviegoing public’s problem with this pic is: Chris Pine, Tom Hardy, and Reese Witherspoon are just as cool casting as Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams” and “the film didn’t look dumb (and that’s is half the battle with this genre).” Clearly, Finke’s got a short memory on this one – the film went through a protracted cycle of casting, with names like Sam Worthington, Seth Rogen, and Bradley Cooper all getting bandied about before Hardy and Pine finally signed on for the flick (for some, frankly, pretty strange casting – Pine is set as the smooth operator and Hardy is the good boy), and the film was lensed back in 2010. Does the moviegoing public really care about stuff like that?