Warner Bros.

Aaron Eckhart has had a good summer. He can take credit for some of The Dark Knight's awesomeness, with his Harvey Dent/Two-Face baddie getting almost as freaky as Heath Ledger's Joker. But $500 million later, we have to ask him: Two-Face could survive that deadly fall at the construction site, right?

"No," Eckhart told E! News at the junket for Towelhead yesterday. "He is dead as a doornail. He ain't comin' back, baby. No."

The fans want him back, and the actor wants to come back, but ultimately director Christopher Nolan is the bad parent.

"I asked Chris that question. He goes, 'You're dead.' Before I could even get the question out of my mouth, 'Hey Chris, am I...' 'You're dead.' "

But death has never been a problem for comic book characters! "I'm not coming back," he said. "Unfortunately, Heath was supposed to go along."

Eckhart knows, too, that there are plenty of Batvillains waiting for spots in the sequels. He's even jealous about one rumor. "I heard Angelina Jolie was going to be Catwoman," he said. "I thought that was a great idea. I'd like to be in that one."

Oh, but sorry. Didn't you hear? You're dead.

Universal; James Devaney/Getty Images; MGM

As if Hellboy and Hobbits weren't enough to keep him off the streets, Guillermo del Toro has literally scared up some more work.

The fantastical filmmaker has been tapped by Universal to helm remakes of Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, per Variety, along with a big-screen adaptation of Charles Dickens' final novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood simply titled Drood, and a new take on Kurt Vonnegut's cult novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

The Oscar-nominated helmer, who is currently prepping the Hobbit films with Peter Jackson, will most likely begin with Drood, a murder mystery that Dickens never completed.

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Clay Enos. TM & © DC Comics

Judgment day for Watchmen is nigh.

A federal judge in Los Angeles has set Jan. 6 as the start of the showdown between 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. over the movie adaptation of the vaunted graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Gibbons.

Watchmen has devolved from a comic book flick into a courtroom drama in recent months, as Fox came forward with a complicated case claiming it still owns the rights to Watchmen and is seeking to block the release of Warners' anticipated film.

Fox scored a legal victory last month when U.S. District Judge Gary Allen Feess ruled there was enough evidence to go to trial. But on Tuesday, he shot down Fox's request to halt the March 6 release of the Warners movie, helmed by 300's Zach Snyder and starring Patrick Wilson, Carla Gugino, Billy Crudup and Jackie Earle Haley as a group of ostracized former superheroes trying to save the world and themselves.

Instead, according to the Hollywood Reporter, Feess fast-tracked the trial, presumably giving the two studios a chance to reach a settlement in the matter before deciding on potentially harsher measures.

Warner Bros. Entertainment.com

Even Batman gets tired.

The Dark Knight grossed $986,453 yesterday, the first time the supreme summer blockbuster had failed to make at least $1 million in a single day.

The movie, already Hollywood's No. 2 all-time grosser at the domestic box office, is expected to rally this weekend, and bring its overall total to an epic $500 million.

Through Wednesday, its 41st day in release, The Dark Knight had grossed $492.7 million.

At the same point in its run in 1998, Titanic, Hollywood's reigning domestic champ, had grossed $280.2 million.

Any appearance that The Dark Knight is winning the race with Titanic, however, is deceiving.

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New Line Cinema

Peter Jackson just can't kick his Hobbit habit.

After a fruitless eight-month search for the perfect scribe, the Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings overlord and his handpicked Hobbit helmer, Guillermo del Toro, have decided they're the best men for the job of adapting J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth prequel into two films.

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Clay Enos. TM & © DC Comics

Who will watch Watchmen? Nobody, if 20th Century Fox gets its way.

After a major court victory, the studio has announced a bid to block the release of Warner Bros.' anticipated adaptation of the seminal graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

Fox originally tried to develop the project more than a decade ago, but didn't manage to get the film off the drawing board. The studio claims Warners never properly acquired the rights to Watchmen, and, in a major twist, instead of seeking a share of the would-be blockbuster's box-office gross, Fox is seeking to kill the flick entirely before it unspools in theaters March 6.

Cue the agonized cries of fanboys everywhere.

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Sci Fi

Get ready for a Battlestar Galactica of frakkin' supersized proportions.

Fresh off the announcement that the upcoming 10-episode swan-song season of Battlestar Galactica will include even longer episodes than usual, the Sci Fi Channel has announced that the cult fave will live on a tiny bit longer in the form of a two-hour movie set to air on the cable channel after the series concludes.

The stand-alone special, set in the time period immediately before the Cylons' catastrophic attack on Caprica, will be directed by Edward James Olmos and star series regulars Michael Trucco, Aaron Douglas and Dean Stockwell.

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Warner Brothers

Eighteen days.

That's all it took for The Dark Knight to break $400 million.

The Batman movie grossed another $6.3 million on Monday, per final numbers from Exhibitor Relations, bringing its overall domestic total to $400,038,494 and setting yet another land-speed record.

The fastest film to $100 million, $200 million and $300 million is now the fastest film to $400 million. By a lot.

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Warner Bros. Entertainment.com

The Dark Knight isn't king of the world, but it's getting closer.

The fastest-grossing blockbuster in Hollywood history took in another $43.8 million at the weekend box office, per studio estimates, staying on course for a potential run of $500 million—or more.

The latest Mummy movie, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon, did about what was expected, if a little less than the most outsized predictions, coming up with $42.5 million. If estimates hold, it'll finish second behind The Dark Knight.

For The Dark Knight now, it's not so much about where it places—although it's the first movie since 2007's Disturbia to top the box office three straight weekends—but how fast it movie descends the mountain of money it made in its opening days.

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Columbia Pictures/ZUMApress.com

Could Venom be the antidote to Spider-Man withdrawal?

Inspired by The Dark Knight's Joker-driven success and without another Spidey film on its slate until 2011, Sony is setting the ball rolling on a spinoff centered on the web-slinger's parasitic nemesis Venom, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Topher Grace played the unhinged shutterbug turned symbiotic monster in 2007's Spider-Man 3.

Not sure that the 30-year-old actor can carry his own franchise, however—like Hugh Jackman, who will be going it alone in next year's X-Men Origins: Wolverine—Sony is supposedly open to the idea of pinning Venom's sticky-tipped appendages on another leading man.

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20th Century Fox, Lucasfilm, Ltd.

George Lucas got a split decision in his personal clone war.

The Jedi mastermind had dispatched his underlings to London to shut down Andrew Ainsworth, a designer of the original Imperial Stormtrooper helmet who was offering unauthorized versions of the classic headgear on the Web to fanboys.

For his part, Ainsworth claimed he dreamed up the concept and should be allowed to sell his wares.

With an array of Stormtrooper helmets lined up along the front bench in the London courtroom, High Court Justice Anthony Mann ruled in both parties' favor Thursday.

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Rena Durham/ZUMAPRess.com, CBS

Don't worry: Chris Pine, who plays a young James T. Kirk in J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek movie, won't be pulling a Shatner. As in, he won't be imitating the famous...dramatic....pauses...of his '60s predecessor.

"Really what [William] Shatner did was very specific and very unique to him," Pine told E! News this week, while promoting Bottle Shock, an indie about Napa Valley vintners. "I think if I went to mimic-ville, I went to try to do Shatner, it would not have been smart."

It looks like Pine will, however, take Shatner's example when it comes to getting it on with alien ladies. Keep reading for scoop on interplanetary love, Trek technology and more:

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