As I have discussed on Disney In Depth recently, the purchase of three key film properties – Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm – that have further realized Disney’s influence in the entertainment industry. Even the 2004 acquisition of The Muppets has forever changed the outlook for Jim Henson’s most adored faces. All of these characters unite the geek community, even those who enjoy Disney. In this edition, I will share some popular YouTube videos that spoof Marvel Studios, Pixar, Muppet, Star Wars and “regular” Disney films by featuring some famous personalities from the whole Disney universe.

The thing with magic is that the magician has a lot of distractions up his sleeve, so you end up focusing on one thing when you should be paying attention to the other. It’s all fun and games, but when the trick consists of Robin Hood-esque magicians stealing from a heavily fortified bank and giving its money back to the audience members, you really might want to pay attention.

The first trailer for Now You See Me, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, Mark Ruffalo, and Dave Franco, is now on line. Check it out here below.

The film is more of an action-adventure heist that uses practical magic tricks as well as some help with computer-generated visuals. A lot of genres are mixed into this one film, but I am sure that the magic aspect of it will be the thing to draw audiences in. But overall it looks like a lot of fun, especially if you are into magic and heists.

Hello there, fellow cultural mutants. Humble writer BAADASSSSS! is here to announce the launch of a special new regular column for Geeks of Doom, “If BAADASSSSS! Controlled The Universe.” I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of alternate timelines where certain events had radically different outcomes than the ones we know of, outcomes that forever altered the course of human history. Many books and articles have been written about the greatest movies that were never made. Most of those aborted features would have been dreams made reality for movie fans the world over were they made. With that in mind I will devote each edition of “If BAADASSSSS! Controlled The Universe” to the construction of my own personal alternate history of cinema where the movies that we beat ourselves over the head with our own shoes wondering how come they were never made did in fact make it to the big screen, and each time the results were glorious.

For this inaugural edition I take a look at The Expendables, but not the one we all know and mostly love. The all-star 2010 action epic headlined by Sylvester Stallone and a small army of the screen’s greatest ass-kicking manly men defied the odds by becoming a global box office sensation and giving rise to a sequel set to open this Friday that looks even better than the original. But let us consider for a moment what would The Expendables have looked like if it was made with an entirely different cast in a much different time. In this alternate reality the Stallone movie is actually a unacknowledged remake of a star-studded spectacular of bullets, bombs, and babes from the late 1970s that unfortunately remained unfinished and unreleased. Now imagine that the footage from the production of the original Expendables that survived had recently surfaced and we were about to get a first hand look into a movie that had the potential to be one of the greatest action films ever made.

The Dark Knight Rises
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Morgan Freeman
Warner Bros. Pictures
Rated PG-13 | 164 Minutes
Release Date: July 20, 2012

In Christopher Nolan‘s 2006 film, The Prestige, Cutter (Michael Caine) explains, “Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts.”

“The first part is called The Pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t.”

“The second act is called The Turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back.”

“That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call The Prestige.” Ladies and gentlemen, that’s The Dark Knight Rises – the third act to an astounding magic trick by a world-class illusionist in director Christopher Nolan.

The Dark Knight Rises is just mere days away (eight, to be exact), and if you got the same tingling feeling from listening to the soundtrack as I did, then you are just as excited as I am to see this movie.

But that’s just a taste of the good stuff, what comes next is like the cherry on top. There’s a new IMAX poster and a “Journey” trailer, and you can check both of them out below.