Given the recent end to the Writer’s strikes, Roberto Orci has spo­ken out on Don Murphy’s mes­sage board about the sta­tus of the Trans­form­ers movie development:

So we got back to work this week and we find out Bay and pro­duc­tion has been prep­ping the entire movie off of our pre-strike out­line! The very one we turned in the night before the strike.

We had two weeks on the out­line. We’re still going through the prep sched­ule to find out what has been prepped so far down the road that it can be changed and what can’t.

[Michael Bay] essen­tially trans­ferred our out­line into screen­play for­mat and came up with some really fun gags and a few descrip­tions of the kind of hard­ware he will need for production.

As far as I am con­cerned, this is pretty bad news. Looks like the stu­dios and Bay him­self are rush­ing out a lower qual­ity screen­play to meet tar­gets rather than spend some qual­ity time fine tun­ing the piece. Hope­fully Bay’s tom­fool­ery will not be too destruc­tive to the film’s sto­ry­line quality.

Michael Bay — “I’ve been writ­ing Trans­form­ers 2. We’ve got our char­ac­ters all designed. I always write all my scripts, my movies any­way so at least I’ve got some­thing to give the writ­ers. It’s like a tem­plate. We have a really good out­line so I worked on that. […] We had to because I want to make my date. I’m not going to let the strike take me down.”

EDIT: YouTube video taken down (odd con­sid­er­ing it seems entirely pro­mo­tional), you can still find a copy at IO9.

Here is our first look at the six part straight to DVD animé that fills in the gaps between Bat­man Begins and The Dark Knight. Far from a teaser trailer, this is a ten minute “pre­mière” with a lot of back­ground on the Bat­man char­ac­ter and the thoughts behind its creation.

The hour and a half show, Movie Geeks United, hosted at Blog Talk Radio, has a new episode dis­cussing the lat­est movie release, Fan­boy, and the upcom­ing Zodiac director’s cut — in which they inter­view the screen­writer James Van­der­bilt. Of note to us Spidey fans, he talks about com­ing into the next Spi­der­man movie. Here are some choice quotes via Comics2Film:

“I went in on that. I really loved the films,” Van­der­bilt said. “It’s sort of an odd process because you’re sit­ting down with the peo­ple who made the first three and going, ‘Well let me tell you what to do.’

But I was lucky enough that they were inter­ested in me and I’m a huge fan of those movies, so we closed that up right before the strike. Once the strike’s over I get to go to work.”

DVD­Town got in first on this one, with thanks to Ghell who sent this in.

Accord­ing to a just held press con­fer­ence Warner Bros. has some new excit­ing Bat­man releases on its way.

Bat­man Begins: Lim­ited Collector’s Edi­tion Gift Set [that’s a mouth­ful] will arrive on DVD and Blu-ray. The Bat­man Anthol­ogy box will also be released on Blu-ray.

Again, all titles should arrive this fall and will probaly be released along­side the lat­est Bat­man install­ment “The Dark Knight.”

This is a very well exe­cuted Lego adap­ta­tion of the first Dark Knight trailer, I’ll let you judge it…

All of us that have been fol­low­ing Ledger over the past few months knew this already, but it’s reas­sur­ing to get some con­fir­ma­tion. After all those defam­ing rumors cir­cu­lat­ing in the tabloid press, we can tell you that Heath Ledger did not pur­pose­fully take his own life.

From the BBC:

Hol­ly­wood actor Heath Ledger died of an acci­den­tal over­dose of six dif­fer­ent types of pre­scrip­tion drugs, New York author­i­ties have revealed. […] The city med­ical examiner’s spokes­woman said Ledger died “as the result of acute intox­i­ca­tion by the com­bined effects” of the dif­fer­ent drugs.

“While no med­ica­tions were taken in excess, we learned today the com­bi­na­tion of doctor-prescribed drugs proved lethal for our boy. Heath’s acci­den­tal death serves as a cau­tion to the hid­den dan­gers of com­bin­ing pre­scrip­tion med­ica­tion, even at low dosage.”

And so the Dark Knight news con­tin­ues in absence of Heath Ledger, that melan­choly feel­ing con­tin­ues to linger. It is going to be a lit­tle weird in these next few months, as pro­mo­tion gears up again and we get more viral mar­ket­ing cam­paigns — prob­a­bly with the same Joker stance.

Com­ing Soon have posted three new shots of Bat­man in an assort­ment of poses:

A pos­si­ble new poster here, looks a lit­tle green and fake but that may just be the qual­ity of the image itself. I pre­fer the other posters that we have seen.

Bruce Wayne aside the new Bat-suit (every­thing always has to be new and improved!)

The offi­cial Warner Bros. Dark Knight web­site has paid trib­ute to the late Heath Ledger,

The Why So Seri­ous page has also added their mark of respect with a black ribbon:

(Thanks Adam)