Warner Bros. has officially announced that the sequel to The Dark Knight (Batman 3) will be released on July 20, 2012 in both regular and IMAX theaters.  This comes on the heels of this weeks earlier announcement that they've teamed up with IMAX for up to 20 additional films.

While there is no official word on what the film is about or even if director Christopher Nolan is going to helm the picture, I think it's very safe to assume Nolan is back and he'll start to talk about the movie when promoting Inception this summer.

More after the jump:

While everyone wondered what day WB would choose to release the next Batman installment, we should have guessed July 20.  After all, The Dark Knight got released on July 18, 2008 and Nolan's next film Inception gets released July 16.  He clearly likes that 3rd week in July.

As of right now, the only high profile film getting released in July is Spider-Man and that's hitting July 3, 2012.  I think it's very safe to assume every other movie studio is going to leave July 20th alone.

Other big movies in summer 2012 are The Avengers (May 4), Madagascar 3 (May 18), BattleshipBrave (May 25), Disney/Pixar's Brave (June 15) and the Untitled Star Trek Sequel (June 29).

More as we hear it.