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What is regarded by many as the greatest Batman story ever told may be getting the DC animated treatment very soon…

Entertainment website Bleeding Cool is reported that The Dark Knight Returns is being adapted by the same team that worked on All Star Superman and the upcoming animated rendition of Batman: Year One.

Hailed as the defining treatment of Batman for the modern era, Frank Miller and Klaus Janson’s The Dark Knight Returns is as bold and striking today as it was when it first hit comic book stores in 1986. The tale of Bruce Wayne – now 55-years old and having stopped being Batman ten years earlier – having the ultimate mid-life crisis and coming out of retirement into a world indifferent and even hostile to justice, not only broke new ground: it put Batman back on track to where he was perhaps always supposed to be....

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This 1994 Pontiac Grand Am was purchased for $100 from a towing company in Michigan last summer. Its owner (one “Gabe”) then set out to convert it into a Batmobile.

According to the story at GeekTyrant “After a few necessary repairs, work proceeded: Gabe sawed off the crushed roof and built a custom frame for the new roof and windows. Inspired by the Batmanesque charm of his creation, Gabe then rigged up and riveted on fins, reworked the nose, and spray-painted the car matte black. The car even features high-tech theft-prevention gadgets the likes of which even Wayne Industries couldn’t develop. When thieves tried to steal the car last year, the steering wheel broke off. In the process of trying to hotwire the car, they also fixed the brake lights.”

Click on the link above for more photos of the “Batmobile”, which is now listed for sale on Craigslist. Price ...

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The cinematic future of DC Comics’ two most classic heroes is in good hands.

Christopher Nolan is set to “godfather” the relaunch of the Superman film franchise. This will not be a sequel to Superman Returns, but will begin its own new continuity. Nolan won’t be directing or writing, just kinda shepherding and mentoring the process along into the kind of movie series that Superman needs to become.

(I’m probably one of the few who’ll admit to honestly liking Superman Returns a whole lot. It wasn’t perfect, but I thought it hit on some of the right tones for a Superman flick. But hey, I also liked Ang Lee’s Hulk and still loved 2008’s non-sequel The Incredible Hulk 🙂

But that’s not all folks! According to the same report at GeekTyrant, David Goyer and Jonah Nolan are already at work on the third installment of their Batman series....

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It nearly happened, folks! While talking about their new movie The Book of Eli with MTV News, Albert and Allen Hughes revealed that years ago Warner Bros. offered them the chance to direct a film adaptation of Frank Miller’s acclaimed graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns: the work most often praised for establishing the modern, grim take on Batman.

In case you’ve never treated yourself to it, The Dark Knight Returns depicts a 55-year old decrepit Bruce Wayne, ten years past his prime, taking up the cowl once again to fight crime in Gotham City.

And the Hughes Brothers’ choice to play the older, “decrepit” Batman? It would have been Clint Eastwood.

I think everyone who’s read The Dark Knight Returns has at one point or another envisioned Eastwood playing Batman. Especially with the latter part of the book when Batman and his retinue are on horseback, riding hard ...

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So sayeth Marvel’s president Kevin Feige… and it’s pretty hard to disagree with his logic. 1997’s fourth and final installment of the original Batman film franchise, notes Feige, “was so bad that it demanded a new way of doing things. It created the opportunity to do X-Men and Spider-Man, adaptations that respected the source material and adaptations that were not campy.” Batman & Robin was such an atrocious waste of celluloid that it’s now deemed the benchmark at which comic book film-making hit rock bottom and began the climb toward sincere and serious adaptations like The Dark Knight… because at that point things certainly couldn’t have gotten any worse!

GeekTyrant has more thoughts from Feige. And also from Batman & Robin scribe Akiva Goldsman, who demonstrates enough sincere repentance about the mess that was Batman & Robin that maybe we should finally forgive him and Joel ...

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Awesome news coming out of Comic-Con in San Diego: Gary Oldman – who plays James Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies – was asked during a panel about his upcoming movie The Book of Eli about when the next Batman film would begin filming. Oldman’s reply was surprisingly open (read that as: he was encouraged to let it slip by The Powers That Be): “We start shooting next year, so we are at least two years away. But you didn’t hear it from me!”

So that potentially puts the next chapter of the definitive Batman film saga with a release date of 2011.

Until then, I guess we just keep watching The Dark Knight: a film so overwhelmingly good that I couldn’t bring myself to write a review of it. But if that movie was any indication, I suspect that the next installment is going to ramp up ...

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It’s the old joke: “The inmates have take over the asylum”. But when the inmates are the rogues gallery of the Caped Crusader, turned loose inside the non-Euclidean former manse of Amadeus Arkham, and the only thing their sickened minds can fixate on is Batcave-ing in your Batskull, in a game being likened to BioShock well… that’s the kind of maniacal mayhem that Batman: Arkham Asylum promises to deliver. The game’s story is written by Paul Dini and will feature Kevin Conroy returning as the voice of Batman and Mark Hamill reprising that of the Joker…

Batman: Arkham Asylum is due out May 1st from Rocksteady Studios and Eidos Interactive, and is being built with the Unreal Engine 3.

And speaking of all things Batman…

A lot of people have still been wondering why I didn’t write a review of The Dark Knight.

Well folks, in the end… it ...

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The mayor of Batman, Turkey is suing Warner Brothers and Christopher Nolan over their Batman movie The Dark Knight, claiming that since the movie came out his town has been plagued by a high rate of unsolved murders and skyrocketing numbers of female suicides.

And in Russia, the parish priest of the village of Komarova notified law enforcement officials that he had been robbed. The item in question that has been stolen: the entire village church....

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