Hero Express: New ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ Trailer! Plus New Pics & Promo Images

Welcome back to the Hero Express, your one-stop sometimes SPOILER filled shop through the world of comic based Film & TV news!

Mission Impossible 5: Definitely on the way

Hold onto your butts, because it looks like M:I 5 is now officially… official I guess. It was pretty much a forgone conclusion but I would think that word directly from the mouth of the current VIACOM CEO, Philippe Dauman, is pretty definitive. Check out the snippet below from The Hollywood Reporter:

Hero Express: Dark Knight Station – My Own Reaction to the ‘Rises’ Prologue

Welcome to Dark Knight Station, the Hero Express‘s main stop for all the news on The Dark Knight Rises.We’ll keep you up to date on all the biggest bat-news coming straight from Gotham City.

Mind the gap and avoid the shadows; This stop is the Dark Knight Station for December 16th, 2011.

This edition of Dark Knight Station is going to be a little different than the others. Last night I went to the midnight show of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Like most of the audience in the theatre, I was really there for the 6-minute prologue of The Dark Knight Rises. I’ll drop some info on the latest news below, but first I want to talk about the 6 minutes of Rises I got to experience. I’ll try to spoil as little as possible about what actually happens in the clip. I’m going to get right into it, here is my spoiler-free reaction to my first glimpse of The Dark Knight Rises.

Like the bank heist that introduced us to The Joker in the preview for The Dark Knight, the prologue is a high-tension scene that introduces us to the main villain, Bane. We’re dropped in almost mid-conversation and immediately start asking questions. If you followed the movie’s viral marking campaign, you’ll have a little more to go on, but suffice it to say that things escalate very quickly before taking an unexpected turn. Then it all goes haywire. The focus of the clip is to give us a sense of Bane’s capabilities and methods – again, it’s very much like The Dark Knight‘s prologue in that sense – but while The Dark Knight showed us The Joker was calculating in his ruthlessness, Bane makes it very clear that he has no love for subtlety or theatrics.

“Oh shit…”

That’s not to say that there’s no room for mind-bending action; the climax of the  preview is a sequence that is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. It’s guttural and physical, and the IMAX camera makes it look gorgeous. Think of the sequence in The Dark Knight when Batman flipped the semi, then go much bigger.

Hero Express: Dark Knight Station – Here Comes the Prologue

Welcome to Dark Knight Station, the Hero Express‘s main stop for all the news on The Dark Knight Rises. We’ll keep you up to date on all the biggest bat-news coming straight from Gotham City.

Mind the gap and avoid the shadows; This stop is the Dark Knight Station for December 11th, 2011.

The Viral Marketing Campaign Revealed – (Splash page)

You probably remember that The Dark Knight really took advantage of the internet as a marketing tool, bringing fans closer to the movie and using their involvement to blend the movie’s world with reality in really creative ways. For fans it was a really surreal thing to be a part of; I remember being handed a Gotham City newspaper in downtown Toronto one day and reading it on the subway ride home. It made me giddy. So I kind of missed it when The Dark Knight Rises seemed to be going with a traditional, if not leak-filled, ad campaign.

But things have been moving along in the past few days, beginning last week with Wired‘s ‘leaked’ image of a CIA bulletin regarding a missing Russian physicist, and then this accompanying transcript between some unidentified militia and an unknown contact:

Following that, a third piece of the bulletin was released via mysterious Twitter account ‘@thefirerises‘:

The latest part of the missive gave fans mention of ‘Operation Early Bird’, sending them to discover the website of the same name. The page listed a series of numbers and a countdown clock, but they left it to the public to figure out what it meant. It didn’t take them long to do just that. When the clock reached zero, a map of North America and Europe popped up and internet users quickly discovered they were able to pinpoint locations for early screenings of the DKR prologue.

All in all, the campaign was much more subdued than the last movie’s massive undertaking, but it did manage to give us…

Hero Express: Lizard Revealed, Hawkeye Spin-Off, and MiB III

Welcome back to the Hero Express, your one-stop sometimes SPOILER filled shop through the news filled world of superhero’s in Film, TV, Video Games and whatever else floats your boat.

Hero Express – ‘Booster Gold’ Gets a Pilot, ‘Dark Knight’ Rumors Rise and ‘Star Trek 2’s Unlikely Villain

Welcome back to the Hero Express, your one-stop sometimes SPOILER filled shop through the news filled world of superhero’s in Film, TV, Video Games and whatever else floats your boat.

This is the Hero Express for November 23rd, 2011:

SyFy shooting Booster Gold Pilot – (MTV)

Here’s a short one to lead us back in to where Scoot left off in yesterday’s Express: Andrew Kreisberg , whose work you may know from Fringe, is slated to write a pilot for SyFy based on DC hero, Booster Gold. Executive Producer Greg Berlanti will be backing the project, which fits in nicely with his previous work on Green Lantern and No Ordinary Family.

It will be interesting to see if DC can find a place for its lesser-known heroes on television, as it seems they remain unable to find a lasting home on the silver screen.

‘Powers’ Pilot getting another Shot on FX – (MTV)

A while ago it was announced that the popular comic, Powers, was shooting a live-action pilot for FX, though it seemed initially like it wasn’t going to make it through. However, word is that FX has passed on a competing pilot and given Powers another chance, provided they can go back and do some more work on the special effects.

The comic’s writer, Brian Michael Bendis, tweeted happily about the news:

“In regard to ‘Powers’ TV: the pilot was crazy expensive and very lovely and shows incredible potential for a long series,” Bendis wrote. “The reshoots are planned for January and are all about tone and clarity. I am very proud of the pilot, as [is] [Michael Avon Oeming]. Stay tuned.”

Supposedly, according to Bendis, the process of going back to work on a pilot is not necessarily a bad sign, as FX is known to do this sort of thing. He mentioned that hit series Sons of Anarchy had to do the same.

A Slew of Set Photos from The Amazing Spider-Man – (SuperHero Hype/Newscom)

Two sets of photos have surfaced regarding The Amazing Spider-Man production. One features an extensive gallery of the cast on set for re-shoots, which you can see here. The other is much smaller, but much more revealing:

Most exciting to see, at least for me, is Rhys Ifans‘ ugly hand up there, which looks a lot like it means Connor’s experiment was a success (Giant lizard-monster transformation notwithstanding).

Empire Magazine’s TDKR Issue – (SuperHero Hype)

And here we are with the the Hero Express segment that likely overshadows the rest of these links; welcome to Dark Knight Station. Here are some photos (The best quality the internet has of them so far) of the Empire issue dedicated to the upcoming Batman movie: