A brand new trailer for The Lego Batman movie made its debut during the Warner Bros. Hall H presentation. Check it out below.

Making its way to the big screen on February 10, 2017 The Lego Batman movie features the voices of Will Arnett as Batman, Ralph Fiennes as Alfred, Michael Cera as Robin, Rosario Dawson as Batgirl, and Zach Galifianakis as the Joker.

Thanks to our great friend Bill over at Batman-On-Film.com he has heard from a few  sources on where the next solo Batman film might take place. Now we should all take this with a huge grain of salt as the film doesn’t even have a release date yet. At any point over the next few months the script could change completely and this plot point may have been re-written or edited out.

If you don’t want to know where the film will be set make sure you don’t read any further as some might consider this a MAJOR SPOILER

****POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!

So according to the rumors that BOF has heard from his various sources, the solo Batman film directed by Ben Affleck will take place in Arkham Asylum. Not only that, but Batman will have been locked up in the Asylum with all the famous Rogues from the Bat-Universe. 

So there you have it folks, what do you think of the next Batman film having our greatest hero being locked up for a majority of the film? As much as this sounds great to us, we prefer them to do an adaptation of the game Arkham City that was written by the great Paul Dini. That is where we would like to see the film take place. The idea of Batman being locked up in Arkham Asylum is cool, but you don’t get that large scale that is Gotham City when you spend a majority of the time in that building.

By Justin E. Shanlian

Source: Batman-On-Film.com

With Suicide Squad less than a month away the marketing for the film is about to really get amped up. You can’t go a day without seeing a TV Spot or some new interview from one of the members of the cast. Thanks to the guys over at Collider they have a 55 point Set Visit preview of the things that they saw on set. We took some of those points and condensed them down for your reading pleasure.

•They began talking about the Expanded Universe while they were making Man of Steel, but Suicide Squad wasn’t firmed up until David Ayer pitched his take on the material.

•The present day story of Suicide Squad takes place after the events of Man of Steel and Batman v Superman, and is connected to Batman v Superman “in many ways.”

•The film has a fractured narrative, with a number of flashbacks that reveal more of The Joker and Harley Quinn’s relationship in the world of casinos and gangsters.

•The Joker as a character was on the table, but they didn’t want to move forward with him until they had a part worthy of a great actor and a great actor who would play the part.

•The film is a true ensemble, but Deadshot is the proverbial leader and Ayer says “this is really Will Smith’s movie.”

•For comics research, Margot Robbie sought out as many Harley Quinn comics as she could and then used the comics she got for Christmas, right after she got the role, to prepare.

•To justify Harley Quinn’s twisted relationship with The Joker, Robbie settled on codependency and compulsion as what drives her to keep going back to him.

•In rehearsals, David Ayer would push Robbie to jump on any weak spots her co-stars revealed and increase the tension as Harley Quinn, which is the opposite of what Robbie herself wanted to do.

•The intense rehearsal process consisted of Ayer pulling out deeply personal aspects of each actor to fully flesh out their characters.

•Harley Quinn is “nuts” when she’s with the Joker, but when she’s interacting with the rest of the Suicide Squad without Joker, Robbie says she’s “a little more focused.”

•The “adversaries” in the film are being kept under wraps, but the producers hinted that they may not actually be pulling their own levers.

•Putting Batman in the film was David Ayer’s idea and desire, because he has such a strong connection to so many of the characters in Belle Reve.

•They chose to shoot the outdoor Batmobile scenes knowing full well set photos and videos would leak, but they didn’t want to compromise the integrity of practical effects and using real streets.

•Before they started shooting the outdoor Batmobile scenes, they paraded it up and down the street so all the fans who had lined up could get their pictures out of the way.

•Ayer chose which members of the Squad would be in the movie. There was no mandate from the studio. But he did collaborate with Geoff Johns when it came to crafting certain stories for some of the characters.

•While on set, the producers stressed that the film has a tremendous sense of humor as a result of putting this dysfunctional family together.

•David Ayer wrote the character of Deadshot for Will Smith.

•David Ayer would come up with new ideas on set, or hand over new pages that he just wrote that ended up being an entire monologue.

So after hearing some of these things does this make you more or less excited for Suicide Squad?

Source: Collider

So what has been going on with Return to Arkham? The on again off again remaster of the series was suppose to be released this month, but then it was pushed back indefinitely. So when can we see a new release date for this remastered version of Arkham Asylum and Arkham City? Well Eurogamer seems to have some sort of inside scoop on the project, they initially seem to think that the game will finally make it out sometime this fall, but with so much uncertainty looming over the project some people over at Eurogamer even speculate the game might get pushed back to early 2017.

“After reviewing the progress of the project, the team at WB Games has decided to delay the release of Batman: Return to Arkham to give the team at Virtuous Games additional time to deliver a polished Batman Arkham game experience.”

“We do not have a release date yet and will be sure to communicate that once we are sure the game will be ready. We know this is disappointing news, but we feel the extra time will allow the team to create the best gaming experience for our fans.”

With the failed launch of Arkham Knight and the negativity that still looms over that game, it seems that they are trying to make up for AK. Maybe? Who really knows what is going on at this point? We at Shanlian On Batman are surprised that this project hasn’t been scrapped, especially since there are rumors that they are working on a VR version of Arkham and they have another Batman game in the pipeline with Telltale too. If we hear anything in the meantime we will surely give you guys a heads up.

Source: Eurogamer

Tom King got the title all to himself this issue, and it shines through the entire time. Batman #1 is a huge improvement over Batman: Rebirth as far as clear roles of each character and story strength. King’s got his beautiful story all lined up for us. Even though it doesn’t feel quite as gothic and novel as Snyder’s first Batman issue that launched Court of Owls, it will go down as a classic in the years to come if he keeps the momentum up in the next four issues of his first story arc.

King demonstrated a deep understanding of Batman, Alfred, Gotham, and Robin without shoving it down our throats in hundreds of words the way Scott Snyder might do from time to time with his boxes upon boxes distancing themselves from the story to tell us things we’re supposed to glean from dialogue and the characters’ actions, which were wacky anyway—Jim Gordon as Batman? What? Anyway, suffice it to say that King avoided pulling a “Gotham is” introduction and stuck to the characters and let them speak for themselves. This provided some truly heartbreaking moments towards the end: “Is this a good death?” As Frank Miller would say, “A good death? There’s no such thing. Although the way events were playing out even I was starting to believe that Batman had run into a good death.

King gave us great characterization, a wonderful story starter, and a really freaking cool  new Batmobile. Call me old fashioned but it’s glorious. He also set up the answer to the two month old question: who is this Gotham guy, and his tagalong Gotham girl? Hopefully we’ll find out on July 6 when Batman 2 drops.

Once again, Duke as Robin didn’t have much of a role besides helping Batman with the calculations needed to make the jump onto the plane, but I’m looking forward to seeing some of his training and getting the kid in action. With Damian Wayne out of the way in his own books for the time being (thank goodness) I think it’s high time Bruce trained a new guy.

In conclusion, I’m absolutely on board for King’s run after this issue, and looking forward to more of what I read there. I definitely recommend reading Batman #1 and jumping on the series if you haven’t already—it’s better than it’s been and you don’t have to read Batman Rebirth to start following along! It was a near perfect issue in my book.

9.5/10

By John McGee