As the clock ticks down to the roughly 3,000 — yes, 3,000! – midnight screenings of The Dark Knight, Warner Bros. has set an industry record with 4,366 theaters showing the film this weekend.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, MovieTickets.com has registered more than 1,600 sellouts throughout the weekend; more than 300 just in New York and Los Angeles. And online ticket-seller Fandango.com expects Friday to be “our biggest ticket-selling day in company history.”

The Dark Knight accounted for 88 percent of tickets sold Wednesday on MovieTickets, and 87 percent of those sold today (as of 3 p.m.). Fandango attributed 94 percent of recent sales to the movie.

Batman Begins grossed $48.7 million in its opening weekend in 2005. The Dark Knight is expected to debut somewhere between Iron Man ($102.1 million) and Spider-Man 3 (a record $151.1 million).

Taking bets now …

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the big panels at Comic-Con undoubtedly will be the one for Summit Entertainment, which will showcase Twilight, based on the ridiculously popular YA series of vampire novels by Stephenie Meyer. The first trailer has been released online, so now you’ll at least know why all of those teens and tweens are waiting in line Thursday at the convention.

Commentator Augie De Blieck Jr. peers into the near-future and sees $3.50 as the average cover price for a comic book. How near? Try December:

I think the next price jump will be to $3.50, and the muttering over the high price of comics will be heard again. I just don’t think we’ll see mass defections of readership until we hit $3.99, though. $3.50 is still too much, but the ratio isn’t outrageous. When comics went up from $1.00 to $1.25, it meant you could only buy four comics for $5, instead of five. When prices rise up from $3.00 to $3.50, it means you’ll only get six comics for $21, instead of seven. With a hike from $3.00 to $3.99, though, your $12 will only buy you three comics instead of four.

This is likely all mental and not based strictly on the math. The $3.50 price point is outrageous for a comic book these days, though not a complete deal breaker.

The answer lies in digital distribution, of course, but the system on which this industry is based — the Direct Market — won’t make for an easy transition.

We’ll see $3.50 for Amazing Spider-Man by December. I’m sure of it. Check back here in three months to see if I’m right.

There are so many Batman- and Dark Knight-related items floating around, it’s tough to know where to begin:

• With 700 showings already sold out in North America, The Dark Knight looks to be heading toward a $130 million-plus opening weekend. As of last night, it had sold two times as many advance tickets that Spider-Man 3 on MovieTickets.com. [Deadline Hollywood Daily]

• The Dark Knight could dethrone Spider-Man as the highest-grossing comic-book movie of all time — and mark a turning point for superhero films. [The Miami Herald]

• Is The Dark Knight film noir? “The Dark Knight is a crime story, and not all crime stories are film noir,” says director Christopher Nolan. “But I think you’re seeing a desire in storytelling to have moral ambiguity, and that’s been the basis of film noir.” [Newsday, via The Boston Herald]

• Frank Miller’s 1986 The Dark Knight Returns reinvigorated the Batman comic-book franchise. [New York Daily News]

• Jeet Heer delves into those decades-old rumors about the relationship between Batman and Robin, while Steve Murray (aka Chip Zdarsky) points out the ridiculousness of debating the Dynamic Duo’s sexuality. Zdarsky also created the illustration (above) for Heer’s article. [The National Post, The National Post]

(more…)

With more than a week to go, registration is closed for Comic-Con International. That’s right, the convention is sold out.

According to the Comic-Con website, no onsite membership badges will be sold.

BOOM! Studios sent out a release this afternoon announcing that movie make-up artist John Wrightson, son of comics legend Bernie Wrightson, would be turning fans who buy BOOM! T-shirts into zombies at their booth in San Diego this year.

John is currently working on the new Terminator film and the new Witch Mountain movie that features The Rock, so you should have plenty to talk to him about while he turns you into the undead.

Complete release after the jump …

(more…)

Over at iFanboy, Jim Mroczkowski dedicates a poem to the star of Marvel’s Secret Wars books, the Beyonder. Needless to say, it’s not a love poem.

With Comic-Con International less than two weeks away, Variety’s Brian Lowry looks back 30 years to the convention’s early days:

In those early days, the entire convention of a couple thousand people could be held in a single hotel. One large ballroom functioned as a dealers’ room, where vendors displayed their wares, and an adjacent space housed panel discussions. Gradually, studios began to preview movies there, but as often as not those events were disasters, irritating fans as opposed to whetting their appetites.

Although it was more than 30 years ago, for example, I keenly recall a preview of the 1978 feature Superman, where the studio rep described the campy villain Lex Luthor, played by Gene Hackman as a real-estate mogul, not a master criminal. He was practically hooted off the stage.

Gradually, the studios started to wise up, hiring publicists specifically trained to handle Comic-Con’s savvy but easily riled audience. When Ridley Scott’s space-horror film Alien was showcased — using little more than a slide show of surrealist H.R. Giger’s jaw-dropping conceptual art — the crowd was blown away.

On that note, the trade paper underscores how important the four-day event has become to Hollwyood.

It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these, so let’s just dive back into it:

• It’s now confirmed that Robert Downey Jr. will star in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. (The actor’s interest in the role initially was reported last month.) The Warner Bros. production is based on a forthcoming comic by producer Lionel Wigram. Ritchie polished the script, written by Anthony Peckham. [Variety]

• David Fincher’s planned remake of Heavy Metal has hit a wall at Paramount Pictures, where new production executives feel the content is too risque for mainstream audiences. So Fincher, Blur Studio and Heavy Metal magazine publisher Kevin Eastman are shopping for a new home. [Hollywood Insider]

• Don’t be surprised if one of the longest lines at Comic-Con is for the July 24 Summit Pictures panel. That’s because it will feature the cast of Twilight, the big-screen adaptation of the wildly popular YA novels by Stephenie Meyer. (Frankly, I’m shocked we haven’t seen an announcement of Twilight graphic novels, OEL manga or otherwise.) The movie’s promotional push starts with the cover of Entertainment Weekly (above) and then kicks into high gear in San Diego. “… Twilight is one of the movies sure to pop at the biggest marketing launch platform I can think of right now,” writes Variety’s Anne Thompson. “Is there one bigger? Cannes is one thing. Sundance and Toronto another. But the impact of Comic-Con on the movie-marketplace is huge.” [Thompson on Hollywood]

• Hellboy II director Guillermo del Toro talks about 14 influences that shaped his style, including the Wein-Wrightson Swamp Thing and Jack Kirby’s The Demon. [EW.com]

• Hellboy is the only franchise in recent memory to jump from one movie studio to another. [The Hollywood Reporter]

– The Chicago Tribune’s Red Eye blog is hosting one of those “Which hero is better?” tournaments you’ve probably seen on message boards. Not that there’s anything wrong with pondering if Iron Man is better than Elektra or if Thor can beat Buffy, mind you; I’ve done it many times. But I’m looking forward more to the New York Times’ “Who should be in the JLA?” quiz or the Wall Street Journal’s “Which super heroine is hottest?” poll.

– Can Swamp Thing fill the Martian Manhunter’s shoes in the JLA?

– “Make some comic books like you fucking mean it.”

– Calvin Reid profiles Keith Knight.

– Grant Morrison has updated his Web site.

– Here’s some good news: IDW is going to reprint Bill Messner-Loebs’ Journey.

– Yet another New Yorker caption contest cartoon is being accused of plagiarism.

– Viz has acquired four new manga.

– Mike Sterling collects stories about the fates of the Peanuts characters.

Compiled by JK and Chris

Since Rich Johnston, or possibly Wizard, let the cat out of the bag — too soon, apparently — about veteran writer Larry Hama’s return to G.I. Joe for IDW’s reboot, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Chris Ryall started a message-board thread to answer the first 10 questions about the new title.

Topics range from the inclusion of specific characters and where the team will be headquartered to how much “free rein” IDW has with the license and confirmation that, yes, this series is a reboot:

Are we doing a reboot? The answer is, we’re starting at the beginning. A New Beginning. But we’re doing it in a way akin to what they did with James Bond last year. The movie stripped away a lot of the things that had made the franchise feel bloated and ridiculous and started over. Not necessarily scrapping what was to come in the characters’ future movies, but resetting things, losing the bloat, making the character stand out again, and reminding people why it was once great.

That’s what we’re doing. And doing it with Larry, where he’s a two-decades-better storyteller than he was, and with the wisdom of years to think about what worked and what didn’t, is immensely exciting to me. Before, he was essentially making it up as he went. Now, he know what he wants to do, and is being given the freedom to do it.

Merriam-Webster has added 100 words to the latest edition of its Collegiate Dictionary, including … drum roll, please … fanboy.

Yes, that most ubiquitous of message-board putdowns finally made its way into the dictionary after nearly 90 years (its first recorded use was in 1919). The definition: “a boy who is an enthusiastic devotee (as of comics or movies).”

Other terms that made the cut include “air quotes,” “dirty bomb,” “malware,” “mondegreen” and “Texas Hold ‘em.”

Update: Gia Manry asks about the omission of “fangirl,” and gets a speedy response from Merriam-Webster.

Wilcox Primary art teacher Jason Tait has created the Coolest Classroom Ever, including life size She-Hulk and Spider-Man statues. Take the tour here.

As the anti-Robin movement marshals its forces against the character’s possible inclusion in the Batman movies, Jeph Loeb — writer of The Long Halloween and Dark Victory – speaks up for the Boy Wonder.

Robin can work in the film universe, Loeb tells MTV News: “Take the time to tell the story properly. There is a story of Dick Grayson and how he becomes Robin that is extremely moving and very helpful.”

The key, he says, is to build the relationship between Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson. And don’t put Grayson in costume too soon.

“I wouldn’t let him become Robin until the third act, if that,” Loeb says. “I think that’s the other problem when you tell that story is that there’s this rush to put him in a costume by the end of the first 20 minutes and in that case I think it’s a disaster.”

At Comixology, Tucker Stone considers what the estimated sales figures for Marvel and DC’s summer-event comics may actually tell us:

… the reaction seems to be that, since Marvel’s big event cross-over beat DC’s big event cross-over, there is somehow a connection between those pre-sale numbers and whether or not A) big corporate people should lose their jobs, B) Marvel speaks to the people in a way that DC doesn’t, or C) any of this really matters, at all. There’s something else that occasionally pops up, though — I’m assuming it isn’t as interesting to read or write about, but it’s what I’m more interested in this week. And that is that neither of those numbers — the estimated 200,344 copies of Secret Invasion # 2 versus the 159,036 of Final Crisis — are anything to be really impressed by. Sure, there’s a big discrepancy between those two books — but even at the top end of the scale, it’s only in comic books that 200,000 of anything is worth getting excited about.

It’s been a couple of months since the Internet was last gripped by “Robin Panic,” the fear that the Boy Wonder will appear in the rebooted Batman movie franchise.

The last outbreak was triggered by rumors that the third film will rely heavily on the miniseries The Long Halloween and Dark Victory for its source material. Now fast-forward two months to this current round of sidekickophobia, sparked by a writer at JoBlo.com … reading a two-month-old rumor.

But, hey, it’s an evergreen topic, right? Much like Sturdy’s ages-old arguments against the character’s inclusion: Robin isn’t cool, the presumption of pedophilia, homoeroticism, Joel Schumacher, etc. It must strike a chord, though, because the comments thread is up to six pages, and the discussion has moved on to other sites.

At Cinematical, Erik Davis responds to Sturdy’s assertion that, “if you got together all of today’s best writers and filmmakers and locked them in a room, they wouldn’t be able to come up with a Robin storyline that worked”:

(more…)

It’s a question that comes up from time to time on message boards and blogs, and came up again yesterday when comics retailer James Sime asked folks on Twitter what comic got them “hooked for life.” Sime noted Daredevil #154 (above), and the responses he received created a list of comics that included everything from Star Wars and Spider-Man to Unknown Soldier and Kamandi. You can check all the responses out here.

For the record, mine was Uncanny X-Men #115, specifically the panel where Wolverine tore into Sauron, who had just proclaimed he was going to rule the Savage Land. Wolverine responds, “The only place you’re gonna rule is in hell!” the claws came out and I was done for.

Speaking of revisiting issues: Artist David Lafuente (Patsy Walker: Hellcat, Ultimate Spider-Man Annual) gives a wink to last year’s Mary Jane statuette controversy in this illustration, shown during the “Ultimate Universe” panel at Wizard World Chicago.

It’s been a while since anyone has brought up “Women in Refrigerators” — the Gail Simone-coined term for the superhero-comic plot device that involves the maiming, killing or depowering of female characters. But today at Topless Robot, Zach Oat reopens the Frigidaire with his list of “The 10 Worst Women in Refrigerators.”

Perhaps surprisingly the top spot doesn’t go to Alexandra DeWitt, the character whose fate spawned the phrase “women in refrigerators,” but to Sue Dibny, who met her end in Identity Crisis #1:

Right off the bat, Sue gets horribly burned to death in her home. The culprit is unknown, but based on the evidence, the League suspects it to be Dr. Light. Now Doc Light is usually a D-list villain, and he actually had his name stolen by a superhero once, but we find out through a flashback that one day, when Sue was hanging out on the Justice League satellite (by herself, in space), Dr. Light somehow managed to get aboard. Yes, a supervillain had somehow gained access to the League’s high-tech HQ (in space), and that was when he decided to rape Sue to within an inch of her life. The League showed up soon after to pull him off of her, but the damage was done, and they had to blank Sue’s memory to make her forget it. I wish they could do that to my memory—when I close my eyes, I keep seeing Dr. Light’s rolling eyeballs and wagging tongue as he violates a minor character who never hurt anybody.