VideoBusi­ness are report­ing that The Dark Knight is pro­jected to ship over 1 mil­lion Blu-ray units to retail for its Decem­ber 9th launch. Ear­lier this year Iron Man set the record for the fastest sell­ing blu-ray disk, with over half a mil­lion copies sold in its first week.

Warner knows that with Dark Knight’s wild pop­u­lar­ity and Blu-ray-friendly spe­cial effects, the title should be a win­ner at retail. How­ever, the stu­dio will still be greas­ing the wheel with many soft­ware bundling pro­mo­tions in order to encour­age cus­tomers to buy Blu-ray play­ers in time for the Dec. 9 Dark Knight bow.

A 2 CD spe­cial edi­tion of the Hans Zim­mer and James New­ton Howard sound­track fea­tur­ing bonus remixes and new tracks will be released on Decem­ber 9th.

From the press release,

‘The Dark Knight: Orig­i­nal Motion Pic­ture Sound­track’ returns with the ASCAP-winning com­posers from Bat­man Begins– Hans Zim­mer and James New­ton Howard for a pow­er­ful orches­tral score. The Spe­cial Edi­tion fea­tures the com­plete score on two CD’s plus four bonus remix tracks; it also con­tains an 8x8x40 page hard­bound book.

Disc: 1
1. Why So Seri­ous?
2. I’m Not A Hero
3. Har­vey Two-Face
4. Aggres­sive Expan­sion
5. Always A Catch
6. Blood On My Hands
7. A Lit­tle Push
8. Like A Dog Chas­ing Cars
9. I Am The Bat­man
10. And I Thought My Jokes Were Bad
11. Agent Of Chaos
12. Intro­duce A Lit­tle Anar­chy
13. Watch The World Burn
14. A Dark Knight

Disc: 2
1. Bank Rob­bery (Pro­logue)
2. Buyer Beware
3. Halfway To Hong Kong
4. Decent Men In An Inde­cent Time
5. You’re Gonna Love Me
6. Chance
7. You Com­plete Me
8. The Fer­ries
9. We Are Tonight’s Enter­tain­ment
10. A Watch­ful Guardian
11. Why So Serious?(The Crys­tal Method Remix)
12. Poor Choice Of Words(Paul van Dyk Remix)
13. Gun­pow­der And Gasoline(Remix by Mel Wes­son)
14. Rory’s First Kiss(Remix by Rye­land Allison)

Buy the Dark Knight 2 Disc Spe­cial Edi­tion Sound­track from Ama­zon | Offi­cial Score Website

In speak­ing with the LA Times and asked whether Bat­man would par­tic­i­pate in any DC crossovers, Christo­pher Nolan responded,

Nolan: I don’t think our Bat­man, our Gotham, lends itself to that kind of cross-fertilization. It goes back to one of the first things we wran­gled with when we first started putting the story together: Is this a world in which comic books already exist? Is this a world in which super­heroes already exist? If you think of “Bat­man Begins” and you think of the phi­los­o­phy of this char­ac­ter try­ing to rein­vent him­self as a sym­bol, we took the posi­tion — we didn’t address it directly in the film, but we did take the posi­tion philo­soph­i­cally — that super­heroes sim­ply don’t exist. If they did, if Bruce knew of Super­man or even of comic books, then that’s a com­pletely dif­fer­ent deci­sion that he’s mak­ing when he puts on a cos­tume in an attempt to become a sym­bol. It’s a para­dox and a conun­drum, but what we did is go back to the very orig­i­nal con­cept and idea of the char­ac­ter. In his first appear­ances, he invents him­self as a totally orig­i­nal creation.

GB: That doesn’t lend itselt to hav­ing him swing on a rope across the Metrop­o­lis skyline.

Nolan: No, cor­rect, it’s a dif­fer­ent uni­verse. It’s a dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at it. Now, it’s been done suc­cess­fully, very suc­cess­fully, in the comics so I don’t dis­pute it as an approach. It just isn’t the approach we took. We had to make a deci­sion for “Bat­man Begins.”

GB: A dif­fer­ent path…

Nolan: Yes, com­pletely dif­fer­ent. It would have given a very, very dif­fer­ent mean­ing to what Bruce Wayne was leav­ing home to do and com­ing back home to do and putting on the cos­tume for and all the rest. We dealt with on its own terms: What does Bat­man mean to Bruce Wayne, what is he try­ing to achieve? He has not been influ­enced by other super­heroes. Of course, you see what we’re able to do with Joker in this film is that he is able to be quite the­atri­cal because we set up Bat­man as an exam­ple of intense the­atri­cal­ity in Gotham. It starts to grow out­ward from Bat­man. But the premise we began with is that Bat­man was cre­at­ing a wholly orig­i­nal thing. To be hon­est, we went even fur­ther than the comics on this point. I can’t remem­ber at what point in the comics his­tory the idea came about that he was a fan of Zorro as a kid. I haven’t researched that, but I don’t believe it goes back ter­ri­bly far.”

The inter­view con­tin­ues by dis­cussing Nolan’s next project, his time off and the upcom­ing Acad­emy Awards:

GB: You’ve said you aren’t sure what you next project will be. But clearly Warner Bros. looks at Bat­man as a core part of their movie busi­ness, per­haps now more than ever, and there are mar­ket­place pres­sures on them to sched­ule the next install­ment of the fran­chise. Are you get­ting a lot of pres­sure to make a decision?

Nolan: They’re being extremely gra­cious. I have a very good rela­tion­ship with the stu­dio. They know that I really needed to go on hol­i­day and take some time to fig­ure what I want to do next. They’ve been very respect­ful of that, which is ter­rific and one of the rea­sons I enjoy work­ing with Warner Bros.

GB: The nom­i­na­tions for the 81st Acad­emy Awards will be announced in Jan­u­ary. How mean­ing­ful would it be for the cast and crew of “The Dark Knight” if the late Heath Ledger is nom­i­nated for best sup­port­ing actor?

Nolan: I think the thing that has always been impor­tant to me in light of Heath’s death is the respon­si­bil­ity I’ve felt to his work. The respon­si­bil­ity of craft­ing the film in such a way that his per­for­mance came across the way he intended. Clearly, that has been the case. That’s one of the rea­sons I take such pride in the film.

I felt a great wave of relief, really, as peo­ple first started to see the per­for­mance and it was clear that they were get­ting the per­for­mance. It’s easy to for­get with every­thing that’s hap­pened what an enor­mous chal­lenge it was for Heath to take on this iconic role. He rose to that chal­lenge so admirably that any expres­sion of peo­ple being excited or moved by his per­for­mance is a won­der­ful thing. What­ever form that takes. Peo­ple com­ing to see his per­for­mance and get­ting it. It’s been extremely sat­is­fy­ing for all of us already. Any­thing that adds to that would be wonderful.

In other news,

Seib­ertron are report­ing, despite the state­ment on Michael Bay’s blog that film­ing had wrapped, that TF2 has been film­ing aboard the USS John C. Sten­nis air­craft car­rier over Novem­ber 1st and 2nd.

Pic­tures from the set

These images show Shia LaBoeuf with ‘bat­tle dam­age’, Michael Bay film­ing shoot­ing a cat­a­pult launch, Josh Duhamel and Tyrese.

Set Report

Skalor’s Post­card
Greet­ings from San Diego! Just got back today from deploy­ment at sea on board the U.S. Navy car­rier Sten­nis and thought I’d fill every­one in on what I expe­ri­enced this past week with the ROTF cast and crew. It’s true, film­ing did take place this past week, all shoot­ing was com­pleted in a two day span, Sat­ur­day the 1st with the IMAX folks film­ing flight oper­a­tions, and Sun­day the 2nd with Michael Bay in action around the ship. Rumors flew around for weeks about what exactly was going to hap­pen with the movie so it was really cool to see it all go down.

Sat­ur­day after­noon two trans­port planes arrived, the first car­ry­ing Shia Labeouf on the first and on the sec­ond were Michael Bay, Tyrese Gib­son, Megan Fox and Josh Duhamel. They arrived in cos­tume (at least Tyrese and Josh did) and began work­ing almost imme­di­ately. From what I saw, all of the film­ing with the cast was done in “closed” sets. The rest of the film­ing on the flight deck seemed to be flight oper­a­tions, of which I was there and will hope­fully make the final cut. We were told to just act nat­ural and con­tinue our jobs as nor­mal, which is easy to do when you’ve actu­ally got work to do. I did how­ever try really hard to get into one shot in which I just walked back and forth for about 20 min­utes.

The whole expe­ri­ence was a lot of fun and every­one in the cast and crew were really cool. Shia Labeouf and Megan Fox were really hard to find on the ship, I think they were work­ing just about their whole time there. I’m not sure which part of the movie was filmed there but it is prob­a­bly some­where toward the end, (Shia had “beat-up” make up on, and Duhamel and Tyrese were in dress uni­forms). Over­all it was an awe­some time.

Sorry if I didn’t give you any good spoil­ers or any­thing like that, but I think the sus­pense is more fun any­way. By the way, the crew work­ing on this movie have been bust­ing their asses to make a good film, that much I can attest to.

This should put to rest any of the rumors that they’ve com­pleted film­ing for now, although this may have been the last of the film­ing (I didn’t ask). […]

Seibertron’s s250 has posted some more rumors, again con­cern­ing the pos­si­ble Dev­as­ta­tor toy made up of con­struc­ti­cons, pre­vi­ously reported in early Sep­tem­ber to have seven dis­tinct pieces.

S250 now sug­gests that each of the con­stituent parts will also have their own robot modes:

In the Gestalt ver­sion, most con­struc­tion vehi­cles [are] just trans­formable drones as a part of Dev­as­ta­tor, [with] no robot mode. These vehi­cles will get Deluxe ver­sions [that] can trans­form to robots, but I think Deluxe ver­sion [won’t] combine.

Mean­while TFW have pro­vided a struc­ture for this beast:

Dump Truck — Right Leg, Bull­dozer — Left Leg, Wheel Loader — Right Arm, Truss Crane — Left Arm [no robot mode on this one], Exca­va­tor — Right Shoul­der, Artic­u­lated Dump Truck — Left Shoul­der, Cement Mixer — Head

The struc­ture is said to be sim­i­lar to that of the Ener­gon Opti­mus Prime’s com­bined form:

The TFW insider has returned with another rumor ‘scoop’, propos­ing that Isabel Lucas’ char­ac­ter, Alice, will be a Pretender.

The TFW TF2 Insider has con­firmed that the char­ac­ter of Alice, as played by Isabel Lucas, in Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen, is a Pre­tender. For those not famil­iar with Trans­form­ers sub-lines from the 1980s, Pre­tenders are Trans­form­ers that are hid­den inside a shell that acts as their dis­guise. In the case of Alice, the shell will be an attrac­tive human woman while the inner robot is best described as a hybrid of the Frenzy robot design from the first movie. The Pre­tender Trans­former will have an arm that trans­forms into an energy weapon, a long tongue, and a scan­ning tentacle.

This block of text explains what a Pre­tender is; prin­ci­pally a robot sur­rounded by an organic shell — in this case Isabel Lucas. Wikipedia reveals more details about the fic­tion behind them, their intro­duc­tion in 1988 and so on. We’ve already seen Alice involved with some messy green goo and an angry bum­ble­bee, what does that now sug­gest? Another scene also shows Alice walk­ing calmly away from some sort of panic or destruc­tion sug­gest­ing some­thing sinister.

Thanks for the heads up Miguel!

The Gos­sip Girls ear­lier reported that Shia LaBoeuf had flown back to LA after wrap­ping the film­ing of Trans­form­ers 2 and his role as Sam Witwicky.

Now Michael Bay’s blog has been updated, con­firm­ing that prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy on Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen has wrapped:

Nel­son here..

As of this week, prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy for Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen has ended.

Con­grats to Michael and his team.

Now the edit­ing and final­iz­ing of the FX can begin; most impor­tantly we should begin to see some shots of the com­puter gen­er­ated robots. Still no date on the teaser trailer.

A mem­ber at the Michael Bay forums claims to have seen Michael Bay in and around L’Arc de tri­om­phe in Paris around the end of Octo­ber. This could be fake, but if not, is likely padding or filler footage to build on the French set­ting we ear­lier saw, involv­ing Sam Witwicky’s parents.

For­get the Mid­dle East, he’s in France right now…

… in Paris, more specifically.

And this is what he was shoot­ing: L’Arc de triomphe.

Now that was weird… I was walk­ing home from work, and just hap­pen to see a small group of peo­ple around a cam­era… When I got closer, I saw that Bay was rid­ing it (lit­er­ally). The last thing I would have expected is to see Bay shoot­ing in my neighbor.

The scene was about a news anchor from CNN doing a report… It feels like main pho­tog­ra­phy is get­ting closer to the end.

Pro­ducer Ian Bryce was here as well.