Have you heard of Amy Adams? No? She’s an actress. Or something. We assume so because she’s just be handed the role of Lois Lane in the latest Superman film. That’s for definite. The producers have confirmed it and everything.

Director Zack Snyder says that this three-time Oscar nominee (best foley artist? *shrug) has “the talent to capture all of the qualities we love about Lois: smart, tough, funny, warm, ambitious and, of course, beautiful”.

And raven haired! Wait! Uh. Looks like Snyder will have to buy a wig or some Garnier Nutrisse or whatever it is girls poison their hair with.

So, blockbusting Adams will star alongside Britain’s Henry Cavill (WHO HE?)  in the Superman film that doesn’t have a name yet.

In fact, all we know about this movie is that it will be released in December 2012, by which time, everyone may have stopped caring about comic book adaptations and be really into war films or something.

No-one actually cares though, right? The cinema is the most joyless experience in history. It’s more drudgery than washing pots.

Diane Lane and Kevin Costner have also landed roles in Snyder’s film, which will see Superman flying around and doing all manner of super stuff and, probably, it’ll have a darker edge to it because the blueprint for superhero films are the Batman ones.

Unless you like the new Green Hornet film, which means someone should drag you out of your bed in the dead of night and euthanise you with a bolt gun.

But Superman! Yay! Or whatever.

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Zack Snyder, the bloke who directed 300 and gave cinemas a swaying CGI penis in Watchmen, is going to direct the new Superman movie. The film is due out next year and will be written by Christopher Nolan, the director of the Dark Knight movie.

That’s all rather exciting isn’t it? It’ll be nice to have a Superman film which isn’t all glossy and hokey. We’d like to see Superman going really, really dark and depressing.

It’s believed that Snyder landed the gig ahead of other people with names, notably, Darren Aronofsky, Ben Affleck, Matt Reeves and Tony Scott. If this new Superman film is anything Dark Knight, then we should be in for a treat.

Apparently, the script is similar to ‘Superman Returns’ with nods to Richard Donner’s Superman films which were released more than 30 years ago.

But who will be the villain of the piece?

Well, the new movie will feature General Zod, who was previously played by Terence Stamp in 1978 and 1980. General Zod is a really, really rubbish name though, isn’t it?

There’s no word on who will play Zod as yet, but it’s going to have be one charismatic swine if they’re going to pull it off. Hecklerspray puts forward Zachary Quinto who did a fine turn in the ultimately disappointing Heroes. He can do evil-bastard very well indeed and, importantly, can grow a decent beard.

Warner Brothers, who are bankrolling the movie, are keen to get this out quickly as there’s a chance they could lose certain copyrights to Joe Shuster and Jerry Seigel, the heirs of creators.

It’s been reported that they are still involved in a legal row, but details are scarce.

Snyder is looking forward to tackling the new Superman film:

“I had always been a huge fan of the character, but this is out of the blue,”

“I definitely expressed my love for the character and interest in seeing him treated right. The character deserves to be loved. It’s his time.”

“I think the first (Superman) movies were so well done, he kind of got stuck. I think our challenge is to bring him to a modern audience that’s still respectful of the character.”

300 was something of a surprise hit and Watchmen put a lot of bums on seats. Snyder has his work cut out with this one though. Despite grossing $200 million+, the last Superman film was something of a let-down.

And, of course, this being a comic-book adaptation, there’s going to be nerds out there going through each morsel of news with a fine tooth comb, agonising over each rumoured cast-call.

More news when we get it.

And swinging CGI penises. Mustn’t forget that.

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Batman 3 rumours are film’s vuvuzela – they’re so annoying that most people have stopped noticing them.

But forget rumours. This is something teetering dangerously towards fact. According to reports, Batman 3 – the follow-up to The Dark Knight that will definitely be directed by Christopher Nolan and will definitely star Cher as Catwoman and Johnny Depp AND Eddie Murphy as The Riddler (or something) – is set to be released on 20 July 2012.

That’s great news. Not only will Batman 3 be a nice warm-up for the Olympics, which begins a week later, but it also gives Christian Bale a good two years to practise losing his temper so that he can fulfil the historical tradition of looking like the universe’s most colossal bellend right before it gets released. Hooray!

We don’t know about you, but we’ve missed Batman since The Dark Knight was released in 2008. We’ve missed everything about it – from the grittiness of Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City to the way that Christian Bale’s Batman voice makes him sound like an old man who’s been force-fed 19 packets of dry cream crackers and then kicked in the throat by a donkey with electrodes in its hooves. Mainly the last one, to be honest.

But, finally, after two full years of the most preposterous casting rumours that history has ever known – although, admit it, you’d love to see Cher play Catwoman – it looks like we finally have a concrete confirmation of Batman 3′s release date. Filmschoolrejects reports:

It would appear as if Warner Bros. has their man. They’ve announced today that Christopher Nolan will return to his Batman franchise and churn out a third film… The studio is in the early stages of developing the movie . It is likely, however, that more details will begin to emerge closer to the release date of Inception, which hits theaters on July 16. Batman 3 is due to hit theaters on July 20, 2012.

Now, let’s just allow Christopher Nolan to carry on making Batman 3 to the best of his abilities without getting dragged down by any petty casting rumours, OK? Let’s just be comfortable with the fact that Christian Bale will be Batman, Michael Caine will be Alfred, Gary Oldman will be Commissioner Gordon, Cher will be Catwoman, Russell Brand will be The Riddler and The Penguin will be played by the man from the Go Compare adverts in a lady’s wig. No more arguments about it, OK? Jesus.

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Is Christopher Nolan’s new movie Inception going to be as big as The Dark Knight? Unless Leonardo DiCaprio turns up dead right before it’s released, no.

But is Inception going to be as good as The Dark Knight? Could be. Inception isn’t out for another year, so the trailer isn’t very helpful, but it does show a bunch of people tumbling around a corridor in a deadly-looking way – much like how the music video to Virtual Insanity by Jamiroquai looks in our dreams – so we’ve already got high hopes for it.

Watch the Inception trailer after the jump…

The world is dying for Batman 3 – it wants murk, it wants thematic complexity, it wants a superhero with a crappy voice.

But most of all, the world wants Christopher Nolan. But since this is Christopher Nolan – a man who once made an entire film about Al Pacino being quite sleepy – he isn’t making the Batman 3 talk easy.

Promoting The Dark Knight‘s DVD release, Nolan reiterated that the pressure of following such a huge movie might cause him to foul the sequel up. Well, Christopher, that didn’t stop Sam Raimi from making Spider-Man 3, and that was… um, OK, let’s move on.

Although there’s obviously a lot of talk about Heath Ledger at the moment – most notably how his indelible interpretation of The Joker could easily win an Oscar next year – The Dark Knight really only created one star.

No, not Aaron Eckhart – all he did model his face on Posh Spice and do a rubbish Skeletor voice. And not Morgan Freeman, either – regardless of whether he’s playing a technological wizard or a retired child kidnapper he can still only really play Morgan Freeman. And we refuse to take Christian Bale seriously as Batman until someone gives him a bloody Strepsil.

No, the real star of The Dark Knight was Christopher Nolan – not only did he manage to make a superhero movie into a dark, rich, morally ambiguous thriller with a completely noncommercial ending, but he managed to make it more popular than any movie ever barring Titanic. And that takes some doing.

So, while some people are caught up in the trivialities of whether Johnny Depp will play The Riddler in Batman 3 – or whether Cher will play Catwoman – the real question is whether Christopher Nolan wants to direct it or not.

So far Nolan has been fiercely coy on the matter, noting that he hasn’t been signed up to direct Batman 3 and that he didn’t want to go down the traditional route of third superhero movies and write a script that sees the hero turn evil because either a) Richard Pryor accidentally turned a woman into a robot or b) he got sad because Kirsten Dunst danced and cooked eggs at the same time, depending on whether you’ve just watched Superman III or Spider-Man 3.

But that was a few months ago – surely Christopher Nolan has changed his mind about Batman 3 by now! Surely! Surely, USA Today? You know! Tell us what he said, USA Today:

“I wouldn’t want to do one if it weren’t going to be as good as the first or second. That’s not respectful to the fans… It was obvious when the box office was so big that we had underestimated how ready fans were to reboot the franchise. The worst thing you could do now that you’ve gotten the plane back in the air is mess up the landing.”

Oh, you big bloody cocktease, Nolan. You know as well as anyone that The Dark Knight was such a huge success that Batman 3 is going to happen regardless of whether you make Batman 3 and follow the series through to the graceful, elegant conclusion you’ve envisioned for it or whether Warner Brothers gets Schumacher back onboard to give everyone giant nylon codpieces and a script that’s 98% pun. Which one would you prefer?

We can see right through Christopher Nolan’s little plan here. The more he appears to wring his hands about Batman 3, the more people like us will clamour for him to make it. And then, when Christoper Nolan ends up making Batman 3 into a gigantic dogturd that climaxes with Christian Bale kissing Cher with tongues inside a helicopter flying away from a burning building, he can look back and say that it was all our fault. Which it will be. Arse.

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The last time Batman was in court it was for the now infamous case Batman vs. Dick Grayson’s cold, cold heart, in which the Dark Knight awkwardly sued his only co-worker for unrequited love. We’re not sure how it ended, but we seem to remember some major civil right coming out of the thing.

The next time he was in court was for a space-camp lawsuit, and the time after that it was because Catwoman smacked him really hard with a bull-whip once. It was in the middle of a battle. The judge sided with the lady, possibly because she was all leathered-up.

But as anybody who has ever sued judicially knows, three lawsuits are never enough. That’s why Batman is currently sticking it to Christopher Nolan for getting all up in his business and ruining the awesome life he once had. Wait – did we say ‘..he once had’? Because we meant to say ‘..it once had.’ The Batman in this case is some crappy city in Turkey.

There was a time not so long ago that in the city of Batman, Turkey, a guy could really be a guy. You could walk down the street with half a pig slung over your shoulder, chewing chunks off it whenever you’d see fit. And the best part was – nobody would even say anything – because they were all publicly chomping half-pig too.

Then Christopher Nolan decided to destroy a good thing. He swooped in with his stupid Batman movies and turned Batman movies into such a tourist hot-spot that the city council soon ruled people could only indulge in their dead swine behind closed doors, or in their backyards.

Well the city’s good mayor doesn’t like this one bit – and he plans to personally take Christopher Nolan to task over this. Here’s part of the story straight off of a Turkish news website called Hurriyet.com:

“The royalty of the name ‘Batman’ belongs to us … There is only one Batman in the world. The American producers used the name of our city without informing us,” Kalkan told to the Doğan news agency. Batman is a centuries old city, taking root in the Neolithic age but becoming significant when oil was found in the region at the end of 1940s. Almost a decade before that, Batman was created as a comic hero. Kalkan is going to sue Christopher Nolan, the director of the latest Batman movie “The Dark Night,” not DC Comics, the creator of the superhero.

It’s unknown whether the Mayor will sue in the American court system, or perhaps more locally from the big green barn located at the intersection of Main St & First South there in Batman’s financial district.

The only thing known for absolute certain is that Nolan will probably lose, and perhaps as lawsuit-payment the city will just want a production credit strong enough to make a noticeable difference in Batman 3. Like maybe Gotham could be  a suburb of Turkish Batman. Also maybe the superhero could use his numerous resources to wreak vengeance on the unholy Kurds that clog the world’s sewers with their inferior religious belief system.

Also maybe they could work Phillip Seymour Hoffman into the script. Yes, that would all blend quite nicely.

The Dark Knight was such a raging success that nobody really knew how Christopher Nolan would ever top it – so it looks like he’s decided not to.

It’s common knowledge that Christopher Nolan hasn’t signed on to direct Batman 3 yet, but now we’re starting to hear whispers that he’s probably never going to make Batman 3, probably because he wants to make loads more weird little films about David Bowie inventing electricity or something.

This rumour that Batman 3 will be directed by someone other than Christopher Nolan is actually quite worrying – not only because his work on The Dark Knight took intelligent popcorn hits to a dramatic new level, but also because he apparently wanted Cher to play Catwoman, and who wouldn’t want to see a big-haired pensioner wriggling around in a skin-tight latex leotard, right? Right? Hello? Anyone?

Everyone knows The Dark Knight was good. It was so good that it made Christian Bale go mental on his mum. It was so good that it made Morgan Freeman crash his car with an illicit ladyfriend in the passenger seat. It was even so good that we’re prepared to overlook Batman’s silly voice and that nonsense about tracking people’s mobile phones in it.

It was, in short, so good that everyone is desperate for Batman 3. We’d even be able to put up with a Batman 3 that starred Cher and Johnny Depp so long as Christopher Nolan directed it. Make no mistake – Christopher Nolan is vital to Batman 3.

Which is why it’s a pain in the arse that he’s probably not going to direct it. During his big interview about Two-Face being dead recently, Aaron Eckhart also happened to let out this little nugget of information:

“He never said he’s going to make another one. I’m sure they drove the Brinks truck up to his house and dumped money on his lawn. But I think Chris wants to go out and make other movies, too. And he should. He’s an independent filmmaker at heart. He’s got a lot of ideas.”

The News Of The World, which never makes stuff like this up, expanded on the claim yesterday by suggesting that Christopher Nolan won’t make Batman 3 because he can’t do it without Heath Ledger. But that’s rubbish – he swapped Katie Holmes for Maggie Gyllenhaal between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight and that formula worked pretty well, so all he needs to do is find a new Joker with a weirder-looking face and he’ll be away.

Of course, with The Dark Knight being the massive runaway success that it is, Batman 3 is an inevitability whether or not Christopher Nolan chooses to direct it. But if he doesn’t, we’d personally like to vouch for Tyler Perry. It sounds like a weird choice, but it’s the only way that our dream of seeing a tall, overweight transvestite Batman dishing out folksy self-help soundbites to criminals will be realised. Who’s with us?

The Dark Knight has only ruddy well gone and done it again.

No, not struck down another member of the cast or crew with the ‘curse’, which is apparently floating around these days. The film has gone and broken the record for the fastest $400 million in box office history, making the money in a frankly ridiculous 18 days.

Imagine making four hundred million dollars in 18 days. How many tricks you’d have to pull to draw in that amount… it’s hard to take in. Though it would also be hard to take in if you pulled $400 million-worth of tricks, let’s be honest here.

But at least it shows that maybe, just maybe, Christopher Nolan‘s film is living up to its reputation, even with the extra bits of accidental hype popping up here and there.

The previous record time in which the fabled $400 million mark was crossed – as you should all know too well – was a pathetic 43 days by Shrek 2. More than four hundred million for doing a crap Scottish accent? Ruddy hell.

But in less than half the time it took for a CG ogre voiced by an irritating comedy hack to reach the milestone – just over two weeks – The Dark Knight has taken its place in box office history, climbing up the highest US earners top 10 as fast as it’s cast can make headlines through their exploits, incidents and accidents.

Surely this means Hollywood will adopt the same technique for every new major movie release, pushing their leading stars into compromising positions for the sake of a few extra headlines. It worked very well here, and the world of film is surely cynical enough to see it as a viable strategy to affect the home lives of its stars.

Unless we’re being unnecessarily harsh here. Which we aren’t.

If the movie fatcats aren’t quite that cynical, they’ll probably just adopt a new film-making strategy to rake in the speedy $400 million. Said strategy will probably involve making every single big budget summer movie the most depressing, dark and downright unsettling thing known to man, while at the same time putting a welsh bloke in a weird costume and making him speak in a frankly ridiculous manner when wearing said costume.

It’s a definite recipe for success, if you simply follow the trail of facts staring you in the face.

We do have one real hope from all of this though, and that is to see The Dark Knight overtake Titanic as the highest grossing movie of all time. Meaning whenever we hear about the film that brought home the most clams we won’t have to be reminded of the time James Cameron went mad and made one of the worst films ever. Starring a sprout.