"I saw this walking home from the train station after I was at the Speakeasy Illustration show in Toronto. The crosswalk box thing made this shadow on the ground and someone drew a most perfect Batman face on it! I laughed so hard when I saw it. So unexpected and awesome! Spotted near the corner of Iroquois Shore on Trafalgar road in Oakville Ontario." [flickr via Neatorama]

Another day, another Batman casting rumor! In the wake of murmurs that Philip Seymour Hoffman could be the next Penguin and Johnny Depp (not Brian Austin Green) may play The Riddler, the latest scuttlebutt concerns Batman foe Catwoman — and let's just say this casting choice ain't Angelina. No, according to the British press, 62-year-old Cher is in talks with director Christopher Nolan to add the comic-book role to an acting repertoire that already includes gypsies, tramps, and thieves. Says the Daily Telegraph:

Big ups to The Dark Knight, which surpassed the first Star Wars film over the weekend to become the second-highest-grossing film ever. Sort of, anyway: That number-two figure on which the industry has had its eye for the last month since TDK's release — $471 million, still a cruise ship shy of Titanic's $600 million — remains quite the impressive number domestically, but isn't really threatening anyone globally. It's a bit of an open, underreported secret, but after the jump, behold the only number that really matters: your 19th-highest-grossing film of all time — only $64 million behind Finding Nemo!

After The Dark Knight filled out its ensemble cast with people like Eric Roberts and Anthony Michael Hall, we're sure that Christopher Nolan's office was besieged by headshots from every actor in Hollywood in dire need of a comeback. The latest is former 90210-er Brian Austin Green, who tells MTV Movies that he isn't interested in simply being tenth-billed; no, he's going for the brass ring and nominating himself to play the Riddler in the next film. There's just one catch: if they're going to cast him, they kind of need to let him know now...

Undeterred by a signal on the moonlit sky shaped like a persnickety film critic hanging from a noose, a few courageous media voices are rising up in opposition to The Dark Knight, daring to suggest that the greatest movie ever made might actually, y'know, not be. First came the AP, which devoted a whole article to Christian Bale's throaty Batman voice, asking, "Why so sonorous?" Now, in a scene that recalls The Dark Knight's ferry-set climax, even more brave souls are daring to speak up, suggesting continuity goofs and asking important questions like, "No, seriously: what was up with that Scarecrow cameo?" The Detroit News breaks down ten of The Dark Knight's biggest head-scratchers, excerpted after the jump:

The backlash to the Dark Knight backlash isn't exactly news — not after two weeks and almost $400 million dollars silencing even the most vehement of the film's critics. But today we direct our attention to the more disturbing phenomenon of physical threats against some of those same critics, a few of whose lives have even been targeted by rogue fanboys with a taste for reviewer blood. We hardly believed it ourselves until an unsettling taxonomy of freaks coming after reviewers Jürgen Fauth and Keith Uhlich showcased the worst of it:

The LA earthquake did not disrupt the local screenings of Batman, thankfully. [LAT]

Just how gay was our Dark Knight in days of old? Um, pretty darn gay. [Bilerico]

We heard from plenty of friends and acquaintances who were tragically shut out of The Dark Knight's opening-weekend Bat-magic; having procrastinated on purchasing IMAX tickets, it was a tough week to be a casual moviegoer and partake of history's biggest smash. Thank God for Craigslist, we suppose, where at least if you can withstand the Joker-costumed throngs queued up around the block for their fourth viewing, a deal awaits — if you call $60 for two ducats a "deal":

The Dark Knight's record-breaking opening left us entranced by not only its tsunami of cash, but also by the news, commentary and other unclassifiable phenomena we spotted in its wake around the Web. For your Monday morning convenience, here's a glimpse at what the biggest three-day box-office weekend in history will get you:

[Jim Behrle's kitties explain today that everyone reads the New Yorker for the cartoons. Just like Gawker! Also more explication of how to mock Barack Obama. AND THE MOTHERFUCKING BATMAN. Click thru and watch!]

Until today, we didn't really know Mamma Mia! had any competition for the weekend's gay-readiest cinematic treat, with the most recent evidence stretching the film's ABBA creds to recommend tips for building your own home disco. Classy, no? But a few Dark Knight contrarians are out there, subverting the conventional wisdom ("Is Mamma Mia! the gay Batman?") and giving the musical's loyalists a run for their gay money:

Heath Ledger's performance as the creepy Joker in this week's latest outing for the Batman franchise is being treated with such manufactured reverence—the dead actor's even being touted as an Oscar nominee—that some sort of backlash is inevitable. So who'll start it? A blogger with an admirable absence of decency, John Carney.

Aaron Eckhart and Maggie Gyllenhaal dropped by the Today Show this morning to shill a movie, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Eckhart earnestly related to host Matt Lauer a story about their deceased costar Heath Ledger which he'd told Ledger's mother — namely, that friends were passing around Ledger's iPod as a form of remembrance:

After surviving months of Dark Knight hype, viral outreach and tastefully overblown praise for late co-star Heath Ledger, Defamer finally got its chance at a screening Tuesday to see what all the Bat-fuss was about. And as editor Seth Abramovitch and senior editor S.T. VanAirsdale discovered in their second installment of Defamer Instant Reviews, not everybody is ready to validate its Second Coming status quite yet. Is it good? Absolutely. Is it the best film of the summer? That's where things get complicated — on AIM, of course, because this watershed cultural moment deserves no less.

It's arguably the most anticipated movie of the last five summers—the second installment of a rare franchise resuscitation, helmed by a maverick suspense master with nary a misfire to a short but stellar career. Weak links would be replaced. Tragedy would strike. And then a lucky few got to see it, instantly dislodging an avalanche of superlatives. The Dark Knight has, until now, been enjoying the best advance word-of-mouth of any release in a surprisingly bountiful mind-candy season that included Iron Man and Wall-E. In fact, it's until only recently been coasting at an astonishing 100% Rotten Tomatoes score. What changed? Two Daves of note filed their pans: The New Yorker's David Denby (who just lavished his highest praise upon Hancock, so take that for what it's worth), and New York's Dave Edelstein. The cumulative effect of the Dave-naysaying? A sizable dent in the dark armor, with the movie's RT score tumbling to 88% at post time. As for our worst fears—that Ledger isn't posthumously Oscar-worthy, just hammy from the grave—Edelstein confirms every last one of them after the jump. We're seeing it tomorrow, after which we'll try to get our Defamer Instant Review up as quickly as possible, for those who are just dying to know how categorically good this movie is, in easy-to-digest IM format.

After more than four months of hype, it's getting to feel like there's increasingly less to discover about The Dark Knight except whether or not it's good. Variety pretty much took care of that on Sunday, overriding David Letterman's early, spoilerrific review with a bit more textural rave. That was preceded in the LA Times by more Heath Ledger superlatives and requisite bleakness reinforcement from director Chris Nolan. But Anne Thompson has an even better showing at her blog, featuring expansive Nolan quotes from a recent screening/discussion and, far more impressively, a look at Michael Bay's little-known original stab at the Dark Knight screenplay:

Don't believe for a second that David Letterman really broke any studio embargoes last night to tell you he loves The Dark Knight (he's not even the first to do so), but that doesn't mean the pseudo-spoilers contained herein are likely to compel you any less. In fact, the film Letterman describes may prove to be better than the finished product Warners has so ingloriously pimped for months now, right down to Batman's protective ears and the franchise-ending climax we've been hoping for. Of course, as far as we know Heath Ledger is still in the film, so maybe it's all devastatingly true. It's not like the cast hasn't been preparing us. [CBS]

Saul Hansell quoted Digg CEO Jay Adelson defending the Associated Press (of which Hansell's publication the Times is a member). TechCrunch's Michael Arrington freaked out, natch. Adelson then attempted to further explain his complicated position, trying to be diplomatic. Yawn. As we've said before, and will say again, exercise your fair use rights under the law and shut up, because giving the AP attention just feeds its argument and therefore reinforces its position. Moving on:

The MySpace homepage today features the same burning-building graphic used in the promotional poster for the upcoming Dark Knight sequel. It's not a new image, but by pushing the campaign online, it certainly reminds me of recent attempts to trigger epileptics by posting strobing images to epilepsy forums — since survivors of the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder might cry "trigger." Maybe someone at Fox Interactive did it for the lulz.