After watching the awesomely amazing Batman Begins I was completely under the impression that Katie Holmes‘s character Rachel Dawes would not be returning in the next movie. Not for contractual reasons or anything like, that but rather simply because they seemed to insinuate that her relationship with Bruce as we had known it was not possible anymore, and that she was moving on with her life without him. For more on this see the last 5 minutes of Batman Begins.

Well as various sources are reporting Katie Holmes was offered 2 million dollars to reprise the role and turned it down, presumably to star in an intellectually devoid comedy starring Queen Latifa, and on top of that the studio is still looking to cast someone else as the character as Rachel Dawes.

It’s nearly impossible to tell where fact starts and speculation begins in all this. The fact that Katie was offered 2 million to star in the Batman Begins sequel Dark Knight, and turned the role down due to “scheduling conflicts” seems all we can be sure of. The question of whether her doing this retarded Queen Latifa movie is the source of her conflict could be mainly speculation as could the talk of there still being a desire to cast someone else as Rachel Dawes instead of simply working around the charcter not being in the film, as there is no reason for a sequel not to be able to work if she weren’t returning.

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Rush Hour 3. Chris Tucker’s last movie was Rush Hour 2. The one before that? Rush Hour. How is it he has only made 3 movies in a decade? Jackie Chan has made 16.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters may or may not be good. The trailer made me laugh. It opens March 23rd.

King Of California is at Sundance and doesn’t yet have distribution, but will likely see a wide release this summer. Michael Douglas stars as a mental patient who takes his daughter on a hunt for Spanish gold.

1408 is based on a Stephen King short story with John Cusack and Samuel L Jackson. I think the names are an endorsement enough of this one, but the trailer looks pretty good too.

Numerous sources confirm that the unattractive and untalented Gwyneth Paltrow will star as Iron Man’s love interest Virginia “Pepper” Potts opposite on again off again drug addict Robert Downey Jr. Some people consider this stain on the film industry to be talented since winning an Academy Award for her performance in the unforgiveably bad Shakespeare In Love. This does not change the simple fact that with nearly 40 sub par film performances under her belt she has only managed to make a single good movie.

Here’s hoping for #2!

Who the hell calls their kid Apple? Seriously?

In this review Batman himself talks about the Batman Begins HD DVD as well as some features of HD DVDs in general.

From a couple smaller fan forums comes fresh looks at resin prototypes for 2 of the biggest and most talked about Transformers figures for the new movie.

Gen1TF and Nuklear Power have diverging looks at what may be the Optimus Prime that will populate toy shelves this summer. Also, get a load of Megatron, who definitely takes after his Energon counterpart.

It’s nearly impossible to tell how big these resin prototypes are without comparison shots, but the level of detail leads me to believe we’re looking at something in the $40 range, like Transformer leaders of the last few years.

There’s been a lot of pictures floating around the net of various toys lately from this line, but I didn’t think many of them were that special until I saw these.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing Apocalypto, the Mel Gibson directed epic about a Mayan tribesman who is captured and seperated from his family. This was perhaps the most graphic and violent movie I’d seen in some time, and the fact that it was presented as historically accurate it shook me more than the same level of graphic violence does nightly in various video games.

I felt that same shaken feeling after Children Of Men. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Spider-Man 3 may be months away, but Sideshow Collectibles already has three 12-inch action figures from Medicon available on their site. You can find each of the toys here: Spider-Man, “Black Suited” Spider-Man, and the spooky villain of the show. (Hint: It’s not Old Man Withers in a mask.)

Or, just click through to see the images mirrored here.
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News from CES 2007 is showing that many major porn studios are now leaning towards HD-DVD over Blu-Ray for a variety of reasons. A trend I’ve noticed while browsing in stores is that a lot more family oriented films seem to be going Blu-Ray with studios like Sony, Fox and Disney having a lot to offer that demographic, while HD-DVD has a larger selection of adult oriented titles, which is a phenomenon which will only be encouraged by this trend in the industry.

The high cost of Blu-Ray seems to be a major deterent of the format. A representative for the studio Bangbros mentions that the HD-DVD player is felt to have had better market penetration when compared to Blu-Ray largely due to the HD-DVD add on available for the XBox 360.

The number of XBox 360 consoles on the market surpasses PS3s by a considerable factor but PS3 has the advantage of it’s Blu-Ray technology being built in, while the HD-DVD add on for the XBox 360 is a seperate upgrade, which has on it’s own sold less units than the PS3. It goes without saying that anyone who buys an HD-DVD drive is actively interested in playing high definition movies with it though the same can’t be said about everyone who buys a PS3 or rather for those people who bought a system with the intention of ebaying it only to learn the market had been saturated.

Thanks to Matt of BoNR fame for the heads up.

2006-01-13 – Update!

According to this article it’s not only the industry that chose to go HD-DVD. Sony also doesn’t want porn on Blu-Ray and doesn’t allow distributors to make porn discs. I guess they’re trying pretty hard to maintain a certain family friendly image.