Extras! Chris Nolan gets his hands dirty, Show Edgar Wright your superhero, Check out the Dark Knight Rises costumes, Hellboy makes a wish come true, How Dickens influenced Batman and Lucasfilm has had it with these motherf@#$ing snakes, in this motherf@#$ing Comic-Con! Plus much more!

Welcome to The Extras! A daily dose of all the smaller movie related news, clips and just plain cool stuff that you might have missed!

If you’re not a fan of all things Batman, then firstly I need to ask what the hell is wrong with you (did you perhaps come in contact with carrier monkey Gavin and contract his Batman-is-lame disease?) and secondly, I need to apologize as you’re about to get to get a whole lot of Batty news in today’s Extras.

We start off today with i09 who have a very up close and detailed look at the costumes of The Dark Knight Rises. The pics come courtesy of a Warner Bros exhibition that is currently swinging around the world.

Disney Studios will today become the first studio this year to pass the $1 billion dollar domestic (i.e.US) box office earnings mark. It will also be the quickest – 188 days – that the studio has ever reached the milestone. It’s no secret where the Hulk’s share of that revenue came from.

Speaking at a press conference for The Dark Knight Rises (which will be abbreviated as TDKR from this point on for the sake of ease), brothers and co-writers, Chris and Jonathan Nolan discussed TDKR’s classic literary influences, specifically Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

Chris spoke about how he discovered the influence:

“When [Jonathan] showed me his first draft of his screenplay, it was 400 pages long or something. It had all this crazy stuff in it. As part of a primer when he handed it to me, he said, ‘You’ve got to think of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ which, of course, you’ve read.’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ I read the script and was a little baffled by a few things and realized that I’d never read ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. It was just one of those things that I thought I had done. Then I got it, read it and absolutely loved it and got completely what he was talking about… When I did my draft on the script, it was all about ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.”

“It just felt exactly the right thing for the world we were dealing with. What Dickens does in that book in terms of having all his characters come together in one unified story with all these thematic elements and all this great emotionalism and drama, it was exactly the tone we were looking for.”

Jonathan spoke about how despite being written a few years ago, the script for TDKR still somehow managed to be current and socio-politically relevant due to Dickens’ work:

“Chris and David [Goyer]started developing the story in 2008 right after the second film came out. Before the recession. Before Occupy Wall Street or any of that. Rather than being influenced by that, I was looking to old good books and good movies. Good literature for inspiration… What I always felt like we needed to do in a third film was, for lack of a better term, go there. All of these films have threatened to turn Gotham inside out and to collapse it on itself. None of them have actually achieved that until this film. ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ was, to me, one of the most harrowing portrait of a relatable, recognizable civilization that completely folded to pieces with the terrors in Paris in France in that period. It’s hard to imagine that things can go that badly wrong.”

Need some faith in humanity restored? Then have a look at this story over on The Playlist. When special effects house Spectral Motion got wind of two boys in the Children’s Make-A-Wish Foundation’s dream to meet and be transformed into Hellboy, they pulled out all the stops. Not only did the two boys, Caleb and Zachary, get to spend the day at the FX house and get done up in Hellboy makeup, but Hellboy himself, Ron Pearlman, took the time to be done up in his movie makeup again and arrived with a monstrous meal of burgers, fries and shakes for the boys , their families and all the Spectral Motion staff.

If you’ve ever wondered why people make such a big deal about IMAX (and why we regularly rage at it’s abandoning of our shores) besides from the fact that it’s big, then you need to read The Substream’s article, succinctly titled What Is Imax?

You may have noticed that there are quite a few new faces in The Dark Knight Rises, and I’m sure that some of you may be worried that is heading the way of Spider-Man 3. Clearly, you have forgotten the mantra of “In Nolan we trust”. To assuage your fears, the other Nolan, Chris’ brother and co-writer Jonathan, spoke to Sci Fi Magazine about this potential “Too many cooks” problem:

“Oh, I don’t believe in any of that shit. Everybody is always looking for excuses as to why something worked and why something didn’t work. Even The Dark Knight has three villains in it, or six, depending on how you’re counting them.”

“It’s just a question of whether you can pull it off. That’s what it comes down to. I think a narrative is only as cluttered as you let it be. There are as many good films with half a dozen villains as there are bad ones, and I think that is a sort of facile thing to seize on as an explanation for, ‘This is why this worked, and this is why this didn’t work’.”

And the Buttmuncher of the Week Award goes to a Seattle movie theatre employee who spoiled one of Prometheus‘ biggest scenes for a string of cinemagoers apparently as part of some political agenda.

Peter Jackson has unveiled a new Comic-Con poster for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which sees Sir Ian McKellan once again donning the robes and pointy hat of Gandalf the Grey.

Keeping things Comic-Con, Lucasfilm has revealed as part of the promotion of the recently revealed Blu Ray release of the Complete Adventures of Indiana Jones, they will be bringing the famous Well of Souls snake pit to the San Diego convention, in which fans will be able to pose for photos with the snakes. So a pit full of live snakes, in the middle of a mad house of a convention filled with the type of people who generally possess the outside outside survival skills of a myopic goldfish and have been living off nothing but sugary soda and old potato chips for the last few days? Yeah, I don’t foresee any problems with that at all.

Is this the greatest Batman action figure ever made? The answer you’re trying to get out pass all that sudden drool in your mouth is “YES!”

Ever created your superhero? Of course you have! We all did at one point or another. (Kaptein Snotkop will always be my proudest creation) Well now you can put those talents to use to get rich and famous. Well, not so much rich and to be fair, only mildly famous, but hey who’s counting? Total Film are running an online competition where readers are invited to send in drawings/paintings/computer renderings of their own superheroic creations, and TF will get none other that super-popular director and comic book geek Edgar Wright to judge who has the best entry. The winners will get featured in the print version of Total Magazine.

21 Jump Street‘s (the remake not the original) Brie Larson is joining the cast of Joseph Gordon Levitt’s directorial debut, Don Jon’s Addiction. She first gained attention in United States of Tara, which is a show that I know exists, but which I’ve never seen. Sort of like a non-Batman fan.

Speaking of Batman (Like we haven’t been doing that the whole time), Empire has a great look at the oral history of how Heath Ledger’s Joker – duly praised by Empire as the greatest cinematic villain of the last decade – came to be. It’s a fascinating read with input from all involved in creation of the iconic version of the classic character.

If you plan on going to watch Katy Perry: A Part of Me in 3D just to see Katy Perry’s bustiere hitting you in the eyeballs, you may be in for some disappointment. Vulture has drawn up a list of all the actual 3D elements in the film, and the most exciting there is probably a microphone covered in glitter.

Chris Nolan recently had his work honoured by having his hand and shoe prints immortalized in the concrete outside Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. The director was accompanied by his TDKR cast, and had this to say about being permanently remembered like this, just like the photos in his movie Memento.

“I think that’s an astute observation. There is something about the permanence of these things. I’m standing on Clint Eastwood’s name right now and there’s something about knowing that he actually wrote that. There’s something very interesting about that phenomenon of trying to preserve something and trying to hang onto it.”

Kevin Durand (Lost, Real Steel, Robin Hood) and Robert Maillet (last seen bouncing Robert Downey Jr’s ineffectual hammer throw off his gigantic chest in Sherlock Holmes) are joining Lily Collins in The Karate Kid director Harald Zwart’s adaptation of Cassandra Clare’s young adult Mortal Instruments series of books. The story involves a young woman who discovers she is the latest descendant of a line of half-angel warriors at war with an army of demons. There will of course be the obligatory pretty boy/bad boy love triangle. I expect Team “…..” t-shirts to appear soon after release.

You’ll often hear me criticizing Michael Bay for being a lazy director who just CTRL+C, CTRL+V’s his way through his movies, using the same shot setups and elements in every single one of them, but little did I know that his plagiarism extends much further than just his own filmography.

And cue angry response from Bay fanboys in 3…2…1…

Last Updated: July 9, 2012