News & Notes

Robot 6 points to the above t-shirt.

• Christian Bale is contractually obligated to make Batman 3, but Christopher Nolan isn't, so Bale says "I’m in a bit of a fix if he says he doesn’t want to!" There's more here.


• Five-o-Rama lists the Five Lamest Batman villains, but clearly they never heard of the Snowman and his disturbing origin story.


• Io9 lists the Top 10 Mentally Ill Superheroes

Still time left to vote on the Catwoman poll over there to the right.

News & Notes

• This list of the 25 greatest superhero romances actually includes Batman four times, which is kinda weird.


• Christopher Nolan's next movie, Inception, lost a cast member in James Franco due to a scheduling conflict. He's been replaced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. You might remember him as the kid from 3rd Rock From the Sun, but he's done some decent work as an adult (Brick, The Lookout), and will be playing a major part in this summer's G.I. Joe movie.


• Bait is convinced that we won't see Batman 3 until 2012.


• And the 1960's version of the Dark Knight from College Humor is pretty good:

Watch The Dark Knight: 1960s Version and more funny videos on CollegeHumor

Catwoman Poll #6

Charlize Theron ran away with last week's poll. She will face off with the other winners in the final poll. Zooey Deschanel was the only other candidate to get more than 3 votes. Those results have been moved to the bottom of the sidebar off to the right, and replaced in the upper right by the new poll:

• Gemma Arterton
  You might remember her from: Quantum of Solace, RockNRolla
  
  I didn't get much of a sense of her from the last Bond movie, except to say that she's very sexy. So she's not the worst idea ever, but largely an unknown to me.


• Halle Berry
  You might remember her from: Monster's Ball, Swordfish, that Catwoman movie
  
  Technically I didn't see the Catwoman movie. It just looked too ridiculous. I would see Batman 3 if Halle Berry played Catwoman, but I wouldn't be happy about it.


• Emily Deschanel
  You might remember her from: Bones, and apparently she had a bit part in Spider-Man 2
  
  The only role I know her from, she plays a nerdy, emotionless scientist. Catwoman is kind of the opposite of that. I have a hard time picturing it.


• Sarah Michelle Gellar
  You might remember her from: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, remakes of Japanese horror movies
  
  She was fairly convincing as the ass-kicking hot girl on Buffy, which I'm sure is why her name even came up. But I've never been that fond of her acting.


• Carla Gugino (pictured above)
  You might remember her from: Watchmen, Karen Sisco, Sin City, Spy Kids, Entourage
  
  Tragically underused throughout her career, sadly only now as she starts to show her age is she getting the parts she should have had all along. Not that she isn't still beautiful, because she is. I think she'd have made a perfect Catwoman 10 years ago, and would still be pretty good today.


• Alicia Keys
  You might remember her from: Her career in music, Smokin' Aces
  
  I actually really liked her in Smokin' Aces. If she's actually a talented actress, she might be able to pull it off. But it's hard to say that based off of one small part in a somewhat ridiculous movie.


• Lucy Liu
  You might remember her from: Ally McBeal, Kill Bill, Charlie's Angels
  
  I never really gave her much thought, but she actually wouldn't be bad at all. She's played tough, bad girls on a number of occasions (Payback is the one that sticks in my mind the most) and has done it pretty well, with a wicked smile on her face. Not my first choice, but I wouldn't hate the idea as much as I thought I would at first.


• Rebecca Romijn
  You might remember her from: X-Men movies, Ugly Betty
  
  Pretty much exactly what I wrote for Sarah Michelle Gellar.


• Uma Thurman
  You might remember her from: Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill
  
  I never found her all that attractive. Also, she played Poison Ivy in 1997's Batman & Robin, so I can't imagine anyone would want to cast her and bring back memories of that terrible, terrible movie.


• Rachel Weisz
  You might remember her from: The Mummy, Constantine, The Constant Gardener
  
  She's lovely, elegant, and can act. My only concern is physical toughness, but she's not a tiny little girl or anything, so I assume that can at least be faked.

Vote away. Due to the confluence of a work thing and my internet at home being out, I might not get another update in until Tuesday.

News & Notes

• Strangely, the paperback collection of Huntress: Year One was the 10th best selling book on amazon.com on Monday. MTVs Splash Page discusses some possible reasons, including a possible connection to future movie plans. I happen to think The Huntress can be a pretty interesting character at times, but Huntress Year One was kind of a disaster (massive spoilers, but comics should be good has a look at a particularly bad passage from the end of the series). And I also don't think the character would work all that well in a movie. She's a lot to introduce into a Batman movie (which would need to spend time on Batman's issues after The Dark Knight, as well as set up at least one new villain), and she doesn't work that well on her own. She worked just fine in the Birds of Prey, but from Hollywood's perspective I assume that title's damaged goods after the short-lived TV series.


• Living Between Wednesdays looks at some obscure Batman villains.


• And Springfield Punx does Batman villains yet again, this time three different versions of the Riddler.

News & Notes

Had to go out of town for a while, but that just means there's more links to put up today. I haven't really caught up on everything, so tomorrow might have a lot too.

• Batman turned 70 on Saturday, Detective Comics #27 debuted on April 18th, 1939.


• Comic Book Legends Revealed discusses the origins of Bruce Wayne's name (scroll down to about the halfway point for the Bruce Wayne part):
  

  Reader Connor wrote in recently referring to an installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed from a looong time ago, #21, to be precise, which discussed where Superman got his secret identity from. As you might know from reading that legend, Siegel got the name Clark Kent from the actors Clark Gable and Kent Taylor.
  
  That was a common enough naming practice for characters, take one name from two different people and viola, there’s your name!
  
  Barry Allen, for instance, was named after Barry Gray and Steve Allen.



• The upcoming Arkham Asylum videogame has a new character profile, this time of Harley Quinn, and I agree with Topless Robot that Harley is unusually sexed up


• Io9 points to DC's new Wednesday Comics feature which will include a Batman story by the 100 Bullets creative team.


• Some guy or girl on livejournal made a Batman 3 fantasy cast


• And the Onion Radio News reports on the state of Wayne Industries:

Still a couple days left in the Catwoman poll over there to the right, so get those votes in.

Catwoman Poll #5

I pretty much expected Kate Beckinsale to clean up in the last poll, and she did. 37% of the vote, Anne Hathaway was second with 18%. I'll move the results of that poll to the bottom of the sidebar on the right. Which means it's being replaced by the new poll. also on the right. The contestants:

• Jessica Alba (pictured)
  You might know her from: Sin City, The Fantastic Four, the Flipper TV series of the mid-1990s (ok probably you don't know her from that)
  
  On the TV series Dark Angel she showed that she could handle tight black outfits very well. But once you get past the fact that she's better looking than anyone has the right to be, she's not that much of an actress. Sorry, Jessica.



• Ciara
  You might know her from: Apparently she's a musician.
  
  No idea who this is. Wikipedia says her genres are "R&B, pop, hip hop, dance" and I don't really keep up with any of those. She's pretty attractive though. For whatever that's worth.



• Zooey Deshanel
  You might know her from: Elf, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Yes Man
  
  She's more on the cute side than I'd picture Catwoman, and doesn't seem to have much of a tough, ass-kicking personality (or physique).



• Scarlett Johansson
  You might know her from: Lost In Translation, The Prestige, The Spirit
  
  She'll be in Iron Man II as the Black Widow, who is kind of a Russian Catwoman without the cat-fetish. Sexy, dangerous, with sometimes shifting loyalties. So we'll see how she does at that, I guess, but that also means she probably would be out of the running, since the roles are fairly similar. She does have that "worked with Chris Nolan before" thing going for her, having appeared in The Prestige with Christian Bale and Michael Caine. So I guess you never know.



• Connie Nielsen
  You might know her from: Gladiator, Basic, The Ice Harvest, Law & Order SVU while Mariska Hargitay was pregnant
  
  I feel like her comic book character calling was Wonder Woman. She's tall, a little bit intimidating, statuesque. She's in her 40s now, and past her superheroics prime. Maybe she could pull off Catwoman still, I dunno. Maybe I'm age-ist, I thought Julianne Moore was a joke but folks voted for her in that poll.



• Grace Park
  You might know her from: Battlestar Galactica
  
  Tough and sexy, check. Acting? I have no idea. I've never see her play anything not on Battlestar Galactica, where she's pretty good but not spectacular.



• Natalie Portman
  You might know her from: Star Wars, V for Vendetta
  
  She's little. 5'3" and skinny. Nothing wrong with that, as a person, but as a person fighting Batman and not being immediately beaten down, I have an issue with that.



• Tilda Swinton
  You might know her from: Constantine, the Narnia movies, Michael Clayton
  
  A wonderful actress, but she's... unusual looking. A master detective like Batman should be able to piece the puzzle together when a thin-lipped, unusually pale costumed cat burglar enters his life at the same time as a thin-lipped, unusually pale socialite appears in Gotham.



• Charlize Theron
  You might know her from: The Italian Job, Monster, Hancock
  
  Looking through the movies she's been in, I'm surprised how few of them are memorable. But who cares, she's a sexy, Oscar-winning actress who looks right for the part.



• Reese Witherspoon
  You might know her from: Walk the Line, Legally Blonde, Sweet Home Alabama
  
  I liked her in Election, but that was 10 years ago. I can't picture her as Catwoman. At all.

There's no news today, so instead you get Mike Sgier's Poison Ivy. There's also a Two-Face over here.

News & Notes

Webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal again goes with a Batman comic.

• Robot 6 has the details on the new design of Batwoman.


• MTV reports that Ron Howard turned down the opportunity to make a Batman film at some point. If that lead to Christopher Nolan being hired, the thanks, Ron!

Still time left to vote in the Catwoman poll off to the right, which I just realized was covered by the Michael Caine interview for a lot of folks yesterday (sorry!).

News & Notes

KalMart made a simple but pretty awesome Mr. Freeze poster, huh? Anyway, I was light on posts last week, which leaves a bunch of news items left to cover:

• Suite101 picks the top 10 Batman villains: part one, and part two. No Riddler?


• Batman on Film is among those who see the casting of Inception as a sign that Marion Cotillard will be Catwoman.


• S.R. Brady picks the five most underrated Batman villains. Good call on Scarface!


• Xerxy has some random ideas about who could play who, and I like the idea of Kevin Grevioux as Killer Croc in a small role. As long as Grevioux isn't doing any writing (sorry, Kevin, but I read your Zombies of Mass Destruction comic, and it was pretty... not good).


• And Michael Caine caused a stir a while back when he said Johnny Depp was going to play the Riddler and Phillip Seymour Hoffman would be the Penguin. Everyone thought he heard it straight from the horse's mouth, but MTV caught up with him and confirmed, very clearly, that Michael Caine knows nothing:

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

And finally, don't forget the Catwoman poll over to the right.

Catwoman Poll #4

So the third poll ended in a tie. I thought Rosario Dawson would run away with it, because she seems to be a popular choice. But Julianne Moore, who I didn't think stood a chance, tied with the uberhot Megan Fox, with Ms. Dawson a single vote behind. Everyone else got basically no support. Which means in the eventual final Catwoman poll, both Moore and Fox will be included, and if there's room for the best of the rest, Rosario Dawson might squeeze in there, too. To check out the final results, poll #3 will be on the sidebar to the right, just lower down the page. But now onto #4, which is up over to the right near the top. The contestants:

• Amy Adams
  You might know her from: Enchanted, Doubt, Talladega Nights
  
  She's adorable, which would be great for Kittenwoman. But Catwoman isn't adorable.



• Kate Beckinsale
  You might know her from: Underworld, Pearl Harbor, Serendipity
  
  She looks the part, she has filled out a tight leather suit quite nicely in Underworld, and is a pretty decent actress.



• Jessica Biel
  You might know her from: 7th Heaven, a bunch of lousy movies
  
  Her legs look like they could crush a man to death, and he'd be thanking her for it the whole time. So that's good. But I don't think she can carry the part. Her acting resume is pretty weak.



• Anne Hathaway
  You might know her from: Rachel Getting Married, Get Smart, The Devil Wears Prada
  
  She can act and she's all kinds of attractive, but I didn't buy her as a tough girl in Get Smart. Maybe other people did, but she just seems too sweet.



• Kelly Hu
  You might know her from: X-Men 2, The Scorpion King, Martial Law
  
  She's got ass kicking and hotness covered (I think she's the only one in any of these polls that I've seen in person, and she really is stunning), but she's not much of an actress. It's been forever since I saw X2, but did she even speak? I can't remember her talking at all in that one. Which is a bad sign.



• Beyonce Knowles
  You might know her from: Being a famous singer, Dreamgirls, Austin Powers 3
  
  I've only seen her in the Austin Powers movie, and I didn't really care for her performance. I, like everyone, would like to see her in the Catwoman costume, just not actually playing the part.



• Evangeline Lilly (pictured above)
  You might know her from: Lost, and that's basically it
  
  She's sexy and tough on Lost. I've never seen her play any other part though, so I'm not sure about her acting.



• Sienna Miller
  You might know her from: Mostly from being tabloid fodder, but also Alfie, Factory Girl, Stardust
  
  I saw Stardust but didn't pay much attention. As I recall, she played a girl who was very beautiful but otherwise uninteresting. Which is kind of how I feel about her as an actress. She was in an excellent movie with a pre-Bond Daniel Craig called Layer Cake that not many people saw. But her performance didn't have anything to do with me enjoying the movie.



• Keri Russell
  You might know her from: Felicity, Mission Impossible 3, Waitress
  
  Like Amy Adams, she's adorable, which does not work for Catwoman.



• Shannyn Sossamon
  You might know her from: A Knight's Tale, 40 Days and 40 Nights, The Order
  
  She's in two of my favorite movies of the past 10 years (A Knight's Tale and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), but she's not someone I'd ever think of for Catwoman. She's rail thin, kind of fragile looking. And I don't think I've even seen her in anything in a few years, so I think Hollywood has given up on making her a big star (or she wasn't ever interested in being one).

News & Notes

I've been sick as a dog, so not much posting this week. The latest Catwoman poll closed (a tie!), and I'll follow up on that tomorrow.

• Project Rooftop, which announced the winners of their Batman 2.0 contest a while back, just posted the honorable mentions. Pictured above is Jennifer Liu's entry.


• Obsessed with Film ponders Marion Cotillard as a possible Catwoman.


• The process behind making a Jim Lee Batman cover.


• College Humor has a video featuring Batman and Superman that's pretty entertaining.


• And there's yet another video for the Batman: Arkham Asylum video game, this one with some detail for some of the gameplay (which looks pretty cool):

News & Notes

Webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal featured the above last week, which I thought was pretty amusing.

• I didn't catch it in time, but Robot 6 pointed to a wax figure auction that included some Batman movie likenesses. Hopefully I don't have any readers who really wanted to blow some cash on a wax Catwoman.


• Another thing I didn't get to in time, there was a show in Philadelphia of art featuring the Joker on Friday. The images look pretty cool, would have loved to see that (but I'm nowhere near Philly anyway).

The Catwoman poll's still running over on the right side of the page, it's gotten close!

News & Notes

Fan Art Exhibit points to Captain Laura doing a cosplay version of Harley Quinn.

• Michael Caine, who has in the past said things about Batman 3 that turned out not to be true, said in an interview that Christopher Nolan is expected back, and that the Riddler will be the villain.


• Variety is reporting that Ellen Page, Marion Cotillard, and Cillian "Scarecrow" Murphy are in talks for Christopher Nolan's next movie, Inception. Many have pointed out that Nolan tends to work with actors he's worked with before (Christian Bale and Michael Caine were both in The Prestige, Nolan's last non-Batman movie), and many folks like Marion Cotillard for Catwoman, so this will get a lot of those people excited.

Speaking of Catwoman, don't forget the third round of polling over to the right of the page. Right now, the results are surprising me, but I also wonder if a passionate reader is voting multiple times.

News & Notes

• Topless Robot looks at the Joker toy pictured above. I'm not a toy guy, but that thing's pretty impressive.


• The Examiner talks to Chuck Dixon, who wrote for a lot of the Bat-titles in the 1990s. He has some interesting thoughts on comic book crossovers:
  

  Crossovers are the Frankenstein monster created when the direct market became the entire focus of the comics business. The first crossovers had phenomenal sales and the temptation was strong to do more. But they quickly became just anemic stunts designed to give sagging titles a sales boost. They gave up on trying to sell regular comics on a title-by-title, month-by-month basis and went for the easy-peasy marketing ploy of the crossover. Now superhero comics are pretty much all-stunts-all-the-time and the law of diminishing returns has set in.



• And I was expecting a bunch of lame April Fool's Day casting announcements, but this was the only thing I ran across. Not really that funny to me, but I hate April 1st on the internet.

The third round of Catwoman polling is still running, vote over to the right, and see more about the candidates here.

Catwoman Poll #3

The second Catwoman poll is closed, with Angelina Jolie winning pretty handily with 36% of the vote. Eliza Dushku had 20%, and Olivia Wilde was the only other actress to get more than 2 votes. You can see the full results to the right if you scroll down a bit. But this poll closing means it's time for a new one.

• Cate Blanchett
  You might know her from: Lord of the Rings, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Elizabeth
  
  She's a fine actress, but I don't find her to be the kind of actress who's all that attractive compared to other leading ladies. Nor does she seem to be especially tough, physically.



• Rosario Dawson
  You might know her from: Men in Black, Death Proof, Sin City, Clerks II
  
  She's hot, she can be tough. She's a little bit geeky in a way that I adore, but may not play all that well for Selina. It's very easy to imagine her filling out the costume nicely though.



• Shannen Doherty
  You might know her from: Beverly Hills 90210, the new 90210, Charmed, Mallrats
  
  She looks sorta like the way Catwoman is typically drawn. I think everything else about her is wrong.



• Megan Fox (pictured above, with a cat!)
  You might know her from: Transformers, How To Lose Friends and Alienate People
  
  Megan Fox is absurdly attractive, and she's apparently a fan of comic book movies (she's attached to both Jonah Hex and Fathom adaptations, and has been rumored for a Hack/Slash movie forever). I haven't really seen her act, though. I've seen her in a thousand random magazine and paparazzi pictures but only two actual movies. Also, she's maybe a little young (she's 8 years younger than Katie Holmes, 9 years younger than Maggie Gyllenhaal, and 12 years younger than Christian Bale). Incidentally, I don't think she looks that great in the picture I used, but the cat thing was too appropriate to pass up.



• Jennifer Garner
  You might know her from: Alias, Daredevil, Elektra, Juno
  
  She's very much the girl next door and not the bad girl (which is why she was kinda poorly cast as Elektra). She fits the Catwoman mold otherwise, but I think the less than great fan reaction to both Elektra and Daredevil might keep her away from comic book movies.



• Jennifer Love Hewitt
  You might know her from: I Know What You Did Last Summer, Can't Hardly Wait, The Ghost Whisperer
  
  She's a lovely girl but doesn't seem very tough, or bad, or athletic, or anything else Catwomanish.



• Julianne Moore
  You might know her from: Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Children of Men, The Big Lebowski
  
  One commenter here is a huge proponent of Ms. Moore as Catwoman, but I have my doubts. She is a great actress, and as this commenter points out frequently was tough as nails in Children of Men, and she's still a good looking woman. However, she'll be over 50 years old by the time filming starts on Batman 3. Megan Fox might be too young, but I feel like Julianne Moore is too old. 50 year old women with no superpowers can't stand up to Batman in a fight. Even ones who don't look 50.



• Missy Peregrym
  You might know her from: Reaper, Heroes, Life As We Know It, Stick It
  
  She's great looking and looks like she's in good shape. The first role I saw her in was on a lousy WB series, Black Sash, about martial arts, so she's at least ok in a fight scene. She's played kind of limited roles, though, so I'm not sure about her acting. A recurring role as a bad girl on Heroes is the only time she's played anything close to Catwoman, and while she was good on that show, it didn't really convince me.



• Queen Latifah
  You might know her from: She's pretty famous, you know who she is
  
  I think this was suggested as a joke, but I'm putting her in anyway.



• Ziyi Zhang
  You might know her from: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Rush Hour 2, Memoirs of a Geisha
  
  She can obviously handle the action scenes and she's a good looking woman, but I do recall seeing her kind of struggle with English the last time I saw her in a movie where she spoke it. I don't mind rewriting Catwoman so that she's foreign or has an accent, but I don't want Catwoman to have to labor to have a conversation with Batman. But then again I might be in the minority, and most people might think her English is fine.

Vote away, the poll is up over there to the right.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, I've been pretty busy and news has been light, but I'll be back to posting more regularly soon.