The end of the week brings you updates on your favorite (and maybe not-so-favorite) superheroes and what they're up to these days. First up to bat, so to speak, is The Dark Knight. Word just came down from Warner Brothers that the megahit will be re-released in theaters and IMAX on January 23. So if you're one of the handful of Amish people who didn't see it, or you just wanted to watch it for the second or twenty-second time on the big screen, this will be your chance. This will allow The Dark Knight to gain entry into the very exclusive billion-dollar club where the only other members are Titanic, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. That ought to make Batman happy. Relatively speaking, of course. Not coincidentally, the re-release happens the day after the Academy Awards nominations are announced.

Now that we've all had a few hours to digest the head-scratching Ben Affleck is Batman news, here are five things this dubious casting announcement implies.

How do you solve a problem like making a live-action movie starring Superman? Although the Last Son of Krypton has been a comic book icon since the late '30s, contemporary attempts to translate him to the big screen have routinely bumped up against certain limitations, which range from the technical challenges of believably rendering his super-sized feats of strength or storytelling obstacles like finding some kind of relatable chink in his flesh-colored steel armor.

Only one movie in and Tom Cruise is already leaving the Jack Reacher franchise in his rearview.

No October surprise here... The Campaign is a big disappointment.

Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston have a lust for wandering.

Just in time for summer, here's a healthy dose of Meatballs.

I don't mean to keep picking on Tom Cruise, but it seems like every time I'm on duty for the Moviefile, he pops up in the news like some kind of spring-loaded jack-in-the-box that cannot be ignored. Just a week after I was hopeful that Cruise was changing up his résumé just a little with the help of a fluffy kiddie movie, it looks like he's back to his old tricks as a spy/cop/man on the run. The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Cruise is looking to star in Sleeper, an adaptation of a DC Comics/Wildstorm comic book title in which he would play an undercover "operative whose fusion with an alien artifact makes him impervious to pain." An alien artifact? Ooh, I hope it's not Xenu's doing.

Let's get the hype out of the way: Yes, The Dark Knight was hyped, hyped, hyped. Yes, it's opening on about seven gazillion screens (more than 4,300, to be precise). Yes, the hype got even more deafening after Heath Ledger's tragic death. The hype factory for this movie was working at such volume, in fact, that the rest of the movie sort of got lost in all the white noise. (For example, Aaron Eckhart? Fantastic in his own right, but there's nary a mention of his performance in the media coverage up to this point.)

Okay then, hype acknowledged -- about the movie, and about Ledger's performance in it. And to think I foolishly worried the movie couldn't live up to it all.

With a big box office weekend looming (Paramount hopes) with the opening of Iron Man tomorrow, the stars of other superhero franchises are coming out of the woodwork to promote their own upcoming projects. Dark Horizons has both Hugh Jackman of the X-Men offshoot X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Brandon Routh of Bryan Singer's new Superman series out seeing who can out-superhero whom on the publicity circuit.