Rumors have been getting passed around about these two titles for the last few days, but Marvel officially announced the new creative teams for The Punisher and Daredevil during Saturday’s Cup o’ Joe panel at C2E2 2011.

Mark Waid, Paulo Rivera, and Marcos Martin will be taking over on Daredevil, while Greg Rucka and Marco Checchetto will be taking over The Punisher. (See Checchetto’s Punisher promo art here above.) The two new series will be released in July and August respectively, with new #1 issues for each series [...]

In February, reports surfaced that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was in talks to join the cast of The Dark Knight Rises, the third film in Christopher Nolan‘s Batman film franchise. At that time, what the actor’s role would be was unknown, though there was speculation of him being The Riddler or possibly even taking over the role of The Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight.

Now comes word that Gordon-Levitt will be Alberto Falcone, the son of mob boss Carmine Falcone, the character Tom Wilkinson’s played in Nolan’s first Batman film, Batman Begins.

Warner Bros. has not yet made an official statement about Gordon-Levitt’s role [...]

The t-shirt deal of the day over at RIPT Apparel is “Hello Kupo,” a mash-up of Hello Kitty and Final Fantasy.

The tee, by artist Megan Lara, went on sale at RIPT today, Sunday, March 20, 2011, at midnight CST, and will continue for 24 hours from then, and once it’s over, it will not be sold on the site anymore [...]

It seems fitting to celebrate tax day, April 15th, with Ghostface hacking and slashing his way through more victims in Scream 4.

The first Scream was a clever little piece of film making that unfortunately ripped the heart out of horror films for years after its release. Instead of getting horror films we got tons of “me too” goofy horror films and wanna be hip riffs on horror. That’s a lot of baggage to pile on one movie but that just proves the impact that Scream had [...]

White Irish Drinkers
DIRECTED BY: John Gray
WRITTEN BY: John Gray
STARRING: Nick Thurston, Geoffrey Wigdor, Stephen Lang, Karen Allen, Leslie Murphy, Peter Riegert
Screen Media Films
RELEASE DATE: March 25, 2011 (limited)

Set in 1975 Brooklyn, White Irish Drinkers is a coming-of-age tale not unlike many we’ve seen in the past. Though not exactly the most original of stories, however, director John Gray has delivered a decent drama that’s worth a watch.

The movie follows Brian Leary (Nick Thurston), a talented 18-year-old artist facing the always difficult decision of what to do in life. He loves to draw and paint and would like to do it as a career, but he’s unsure if that’s even possible and doesn’t even feel comfortable telling his friends and family about it because he comes from a strict blue-collar upbringing. The only one who he does feel comfortable sharing it with is a girl he meets named Shauna (Leslie Murphy), who helps him expand his horizons. [...]

The first trailer to feature game play from the upcoming sequel to Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, was recently released. It’s posted below so you can take a peek for yourself.

The game play looks very similar to the first game, but way more open. It almost looks as if they took the wide open space that was between the sections of Arkham Asylum and made the game to be like that section, which is fine by me as that was my favorite section in which to play. You get to see Two Face in the trailer, as well as Harley and Cat Woman. It appears that you have to team up with Cat Woman, at least for a bit, as it shows in the trailer Batman saving her from a sniper’s bullet. It also seems that “detective mode” is returning to the game. I just hope they found a way to balance it a bit better so you don’t spend the whole game in that mode so you can see heartbeats [...]

Back in January, Soundgarden announced they’d be releasing of their first-ever live album, titled Live On I-5, on March 22, 2011.

In advance of the release, the band is streaming the entire album for free online on their Facebook page, so head on over there now and listen — it’s awesome!

Live on I5 will contain 17 live tracks recorded during the west coast leg of the band’s 1996 tour. The band states that they had always intended to release the recordings as an album [...]

Limitless
Directed by Neil Burger
Starring Bradley Cooper, Abbie Cornish, Andrew Howard, Johnny Whitworth, Robert De Niro
Release date: March 18, 2011

The unattainable, no matter what “it” is, always has the tendency to attract us. Shiny new things demand our attention, as well as power, authority, money, and freedom. All of this casts an unshakable spell on us as we fluently follow it while we strain to attain the unattainable. We are creatures of instinct built around our primitive behavior and desires, and it is only acceptable that we want more. But what may eclipse all of this is a horrible fierceness found in our hunger and urgency to attain a mark in history: to leave some evidence of our own existence in this world is what drives some men into mad oblivion. Our main character, we first see him standing on the balcony ledge of a New York City penthouse, contemplates this ancient fear that drives him to paranoia and into the abyss of avarice. Limitless, directed by Neil Burger and scripted by Leslie Dixon from the Alan Glynn novel, addresses this fear without due care, severely lacking depth and emotion [...]

March 19 marks a sad day for fans of rock and heavy metal. Two astonishingly talented guitarists, both leading, pioneering figures in their genre and era, died on this date. Paul Kossoff, lead guitarist of rock band Free and Ozzy Osbourne’s Randy Rhoads died only 6 years apart. Both at the young age of 25.

Ask a cross-section of heavy metal fans who the greatest ever guitarist of the genre is and you can bet your last guitar string the name of Randy Rhoads will not be far from most lips. After Ozzy Osbourne left Black Sabbath he was looking for a guitarist for his solo project. So the story goes, Ozzy heard Rhoads warming up and hired him on the spot, so impressed was the Prince of Darkness with the teenaged guitarist.

Born December 6, 1956, in Santa Monica, California, Randy Rhoads began his reputation as a talented young musician in the heavy metal band Quiet Riot, playing on the band’s first two (very limited release) albums. But it was with Ozzy Osbourne that he became known, and still is known, as one of the greatest guitaristsof all time. Amazingly, Blizzard of Ozz, which contains the well-know song “Crazy Train” and Diary of a Madman are the only two albums Rhoads released with Ozzy before his life was tragically cut short [...]

A new interactive queue is coming to The Haunted Mansion attraction at Magic Kingdom Park at Disney World Resort in Florida.

Disney Parks Blog has released a video sneak peek at the ride’s queue, which you can watch here below.

If you’ve ever visited this popular haunted attraction, you’ll recall seeing grave stones and other spooky elements throughout the queue that leads to the ride. Now, the Imagineers at Disney have taken some of those familiar elements and placed them throughout the area, and they’ve also added new features that not only introduced never-been-used concepts, but also make them interactive [...]

THIS IS MY BOOMSTICK!

Yes, it’s back, the Army Of Darkness-inspired “Boomstick” t-shirt, now available from splitreason.com as a Men’s T-shirt for $19.99. The shirt comes in Silver in sizes Small – XXXL.

This shirt has some much awesome in it. If you’re a fan of the Bruce Campbell cult classic Army Of Darkness, then you’ll recognize all the win in this t-shirt design [...]

The immediate thought that comes to mind when looking at the very first image of Adrianne Palicki in full costume as the title character in NBC’s reboot of the superhero series, Wonder Woman, is that this has to be some kind of joke…right? April Fools’ Day is close, but it’s not here yet, correct?

To be perfectly blunt, this image is pure pain to look at and the endless difficulties had while trying to produce a movie and TV series based on the property make a whole lot more sense now. Think of every Wonder Woman Halloween costume you’ve ever seen, and know that 90% of them are likely better than this.

Be sure to click on over to the other side to see the first official image from NBC’s new Wonder Woman and speak your thoughts freely in the comments below!

These words may seem harsh, yes, but when something like this is being made you like to see that some sort of effort is being put in and, so far, no, there’s none here. [...]

A new photo and behind-the-scenes featurette have been released for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2.

Check out the new featurette here below.

ABC Family debuted the new photo (see above) of Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter from the upcoming eighth and final film. All this weekend, the cable network will be airing the first five films during their Harry Potter Weekend Event.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 hits theaters on July 15, 2011. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 comes to DVD, Blu-ray, and 3-Disc Blu-ray Combo Pack on April 15, 2011 [...]

Battle: Los Angeles
Directed by Jonathan Liebesman
Staring Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, Ne-Yo, Ramon Rodriguez
Rated PG-13
Release date: March 11, 2011

As Battle: Los Angeles begins, we meet Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart). He is an older soldier, and at the start of the movie, decides that his best years are behind him, and chooses to retire. As fate would have it, he has one last mission, and he is assigned to a group of Marines led by a young Lieutenant (Ramon Rodriguez). Unfortunately, that last mission involves aliens invading and the possible end of mankind. The rest of the movie deals with the Marines trying to rescue some civilians while fighting the alien menace.

Battle: Los Angeles tries to be a combination of Black Hawk Down and District 9, but unfortunately, it never reaches the levels of either. To be fair, I don’t think it was the creator’s goal to make as deep a movie as those two are. It seems like they just wanted to make a cool alien invasion movie, and in that they succeeded. The movie has a pretty fast pace, and never slows down for too long, meaning that I didn’t ever lose interest in what was going on. The CGI is decent enough; director Jonathan Liebesman and his team chose to use a lot of smoke to obscure the effects a little. You very rarely get a good look at the aliens, and they’re never really established as a threat, other than having superior firepower, but even then, the aliens can be taken down with modern human weaponry [...]

The closest the Doctor ever got to Jack the Ripper on TV was in the Tom Baker episode of Doctor Who entitled The Talons of Wang-Chiang. The Doctor, with companion Leela, arrives in Victorian London. The Doctor wears a Sherlock Holmes-style hat during the episode and the concept of the crimes of The Ripper are vaguely hinted at through the episode.

But now, for the first time ever, Matt Smith‘s incarnation of the Doctor will pit him up in an adventure that places him in the path of Jack the Ripper, in a new comic book from IDW Publishing.

io9 got the scoop on the comic book release, where the Doctor ends up in Victorian London again, this time with companions Amy Pond and Rory Williams, in a situation that makes them discover that Jack The Ripper is on the prowl, and it may turn out that he may not necessarily be a human serial killer… in fact he may not even be human at all [...]

Nerd Approved has the first look at an upcoming episode of Food Network’s new show Ice Brigade, which will show off a life-sized sculpture of Han Solo in Carbonite carved from ice.

The episode, which will air on the Food Network on March 24, 2011, will feature the show’s star Randy Finch and his team at Ice Sculptures Ltd and their incredibly awesome geeky ice sculpture based on one of the most iconic images from the Star Wars franchise [...]

Just recently we found out that the unexpected choice to play Superman’s mother/caretaker, Martha Kent, in director Zack Snyder‘s upcoming new take on the superhero would be the cougar-hot Diane Lane…but who would play his father, Jonathan Kent?

It’s being reported, after many whispers and rumors, that Dances With Wolves and Waterworld star Kevin Costner will be playing Mr. Kent in the movie, currently titled The Man of Steel.

Snyder explained that Costner epitomizes “Heartland America” and that “Jonathan Kent is the only father figure Clark has ever had, the man who was there to help Clark understand what he was meant to do in the world as Superman. Kevin will be able to communicate the quiet strength of this rural American man who raised the greatest superhero of all time.”

Snyder also touched on his approach to making this brightest of spotlight projects, which should make fanboys a little more comfortable with the movie. [...]

When it all came down to casting the pivotal role of Katniss Everdeen, the female lead in Suzanne Collins’ popular book The Hunger Games, it came down to three Academy Award-nominated actresses — not a bad decision to be faced with as a filmmaker. The final three hopefuls were Abigail Breslin (nominated for Little Miss Sunshine), Jennifer Lawrence (just nominated for Winter’s Bone), and Hailee Steinfeld (also just nominated for her performance in True Grit), but now only one remains. Lionsgate Entertainment has officially announced that Miss Lawrence will be playing the role of Katniss, a 16-year-old girl who participates in an annual event among 12 districts where teenage boys and girls from each district are forced to fight to the death on live TV.

The choice of Lawrence is an interesting one in the fact that the actress is currently 20 years old, while her two competitors, Breslin and Steinfeld, are both 14 years of age. [...]

The Walt Disney Animation Studio has released three new images from The Ballad of Nessie, the hand-drawn animated short that will run along with the release of Winnie the Pooh, the latest film featuring the lovable honey-addicted bear.

The short follows the legend of cryptozoology herself, the Loch Ness monster, as she tries to stop someone from building a mini-golf course where she lives.

You can read a synopsis for the movie and check out the three new images for The Ballad of Nessie by clicking on below now. You can see the short when Winnie the Pooh hits theaters on July 15, 2011.

SYNOPSIS
Set in the “bonny blue highlands” of Scotland, “The Ballad of Nessie” is a whimsical and colorful tall tale about the friendly Loch Ness monster, Nessie, and how she and her best friend MacQuack the rubber duck came to live in the moor they now call home. Setting the adventure into motion is a greedy land developer named MacFroogle, who decides to build a mini-golf empire on top of Nessie’s home. [...]

Two of the stranger announcements of recent memory involved Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, and Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky. One was when we were informed that he would be directing a remake of RoboCop and the other was news that he was going to take on a sequel to the not-so-popular comic book spin-off X-Men Origins: Wolverine, titled The Wolverine.

It didn’t take long before RoboCop fell apart, but there was a point in time where it seemed like he was really going to join star Hugh Jackman and deliver a Wolverine flick. Now comes word, unfortunately, that Aronofsky has decided to step away from the movie, though it seems as though he had little choice in the matter.

Before today, a script for The Wolverine was finished by Chris McQuarrie and all indications were that it was very good, following Wolverine’s Samurai storyline in Japan. Aside from a couple of delays, it appeared that production would begin some time in the near future. [...]