eBay has pro­vided us with another early gem, the Leader class Mega­tron and Opti­mus Prime toys.

Mega­tron fig­ure on eBay — still over a day left on this auction,current bid is $132.

Opti­mus Prime fig­ure on eBay

Via Seib­ertron, The Arker also has more images of the toys.

On the red car­pet at a post-Oscars party, and in speak­ing with E!, direc­tor Jon Favreau revealed that Emily Blunt was now offi­cially out of the Iron Man 2 movie due to the sched­ul­ing con­straints brought about by Fox’s Gulliver’s Trav­els — a con­trac­tual oblig­a­tion of Blunt’s. We’ve already com­mented on the Blunt’s pos­si­ble replace­ment — two rumored choices are Scar­lett Johans­son and Eliza Dushku.

Via The Playlist

TF08 return with pic­tures of Jet­fire, Skids, Ram­page, Long Haul, Bum­ble­bee and Ratcher Deluxe toys — includ­ing a shot of Long Haul match­ing Josh Nizzi’s con­cept art pose.

Latino Review have got their hands on Brett Ratner’s new Conan movie script, and to pre­vent pages of read­ing they have pre­sented it to us in a handy video fea­turette pro­duced by El May­imbe. It dis­cusses the open­ing few scenes in the movie, the main char­ac­ters and cast­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties and the film’s poten­tial as a reboot along the lines of 300:

Latino Review

The results are in for the 2009 81st Acad­emy Awards — Heath Ledger has won the Oscar for Best Actor in a Sup­port­ing Role for his por­trayal of the Joker. The Dark Knight also picked up another award for Best Sound Edit­ing. In The Dark Knight’s six other nom­i­na­tions it often lost out to either the Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin But­ton or Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire, the lat­ter of which won 8 in total includ­ing Best Pic­ture and Best Director.

Full results list after the break…
Read the rest of this entry »

On the eve of Oscars night 2009 The Dark Knight’s total inter­na­tional earn­ings soared past the one bil­lion mark, one of only four films to ever do so (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Titanic and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King being the oth­ers). The re-release in IMAX loca­tions finally tipped The Dark Knight over the final élite boundary.

The fig­ures break down as:

Domes­tic: $533,090,262 53.3%
For­eign: $467,991,898 46.7%

What a day to be com­par­ing the $1bn mak­ing Dark Knight with films such as Titanic and Return of the King — movies that swept the Acad­emy Awards up in stun­ning fash­ion — each grab­bing 11 Oscars includ­ing Best Pic­ture and Best Direc­tor; mak­ing the Academy’s 2009 Best Pic­ture and Best Direc­tor Dark Knight snubs even more galling. As it is, all our chips lie on the Best Sup­port­ing Actor where we are all cross­ing our fin­gers and hop­ing that Heath Ledger can pick up that much deserved posthu­mous Oscar award for his stun­ning por­trayal as The Joker.

Other cat­e­gories include: Art Direc­tion, Cin­e­matog­ra­phy, Film Edit­ing, Makeup, Sound Edit­ing, Sound Mix­ing, and Visual Effects. The Dark Knight could win a total of 8 awards, which would be a grand enough sweep minus the big two, although this is pre­dicted as very unlikely.

TF08 have come up with the goods again, this time it is images of the Ratchet, Jet­fire and Long Haul FAB toy pack­ages illus­trat­ing both vehi­cle and robot modes:

Long Haul

Long Haul never talks, unless he’s going to com­plain about some­thing. The other Decep­ti­cons expect him to carry all their stuff, but he’d rather be fight­ing than trans­port­ing a bunch of mis­siles and laser can­nons. He likes to let other robots’ gear bounce out of his truck bed, and then tell them it got “lost” on the way.

Note the sim­i­lar­i­ties with the Long Haul con­cept art from Josh Nizzi.

Ratchet

After learn­ing from Iron­hide that more Decep­ti­cons had been detected on Earth, Auto­bot Ratchet imme­di­ately began research into how best to upgrade his weapons. After two months in his work­shop, he devel­oped a new par­ti­cle beam blaster. Now he needs to find a Decep­ti­con to test it on.

Jet­fire

After remain­ing hid­den for years, Jet­fire is ready to rejoin the fight! He real­ized the error of the Decep­ti­con way a long time ago. Now, he fights along­side the Auto­bots, hop­ing to use his ancient strength to bring his for­mer com­rades to justice!

“Mega­tron returns… keep it quiet”, quipped Roberto Orci on the TFW forums. This is our first offi­cial word that Mega­tron will in fact return in the sequel, although we have had an abun­dance of news, rumors and toys to sug­gest this is the case.

And just to back this up, here are some images of the Leader class Mega­tron Revenge of the Fallen toy, which come via Seib­ertron and The Arker.

The bio reads:

Rebuilt with parts can­ni­bal­ized from other Decep­ti­cons, Mega­tron rises once again to lead his army. Though the AllSpark destroyed him once, he can now feel its power cours­ing through his cir­cuitry. It calls him to seize his right­ful place as ruler over the puny planet on which he was impris­oned and destroyed, and from which he will launch his con­quest of the uni­verse. Opti­mus Prime is all that stands between him and vic­tory, and the Auto­bot leader has done a poor job of hid­ing him­self. At long last, Mega­tron knows exactly where his enemy is, and he has power enough to destroy him.