With The Dark Knight Rises officially less than two months away from its domestic debut, a Bat-heavy mega-issue of Empire magazine has hit the shelves.  Within the pages, you won’t only find a massive poster that features the Caped Crusader (Christian Bale) on one side and Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) on the other, you’ll find a lot of interesting information on how The Dark Knight Rises came about; what has changed since its earliest imaginings by Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer and the original plans for a villain.  Apparently, by as early as the premiere for The Dark Knight, the Warner Bros. executives were all hopped up on Leonardo DiCaprio coming on board to play The Riddler for the final picture in the trilogy (we were half right on that guess).  Hit the jump to find out what else has changed and, more importantly, what has stayed the same.

With the wealth of The Dark Knight Rises material that’s come out over the past few months, it’s hard to keep track of it all.  That’s why we went back through our posts and put together this massive image gallery for you.  Now you can enjoy all The Dark Knight Rises images and posters gathered all in one convenient location.  Directed by Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight Rises stars Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Liam Neeson. It opens in IMAX on July 20th.  Hit the jump to check out the gallery.

In addition to the new banner posters for The Dark Knight Rises, we’ve stumbled across this new secret poster featuring Catwoman (Anne Hathaway).  It’s a pretty slick little piece which reminds us that, while Bane (Tom Hardy) might be getting all of the attention as of late, both audiences and Batman (Christian Bale) shouldn’t forget about the feline femme fatale. Director Christopher Nolan’s closing piece to his Batman trilogy also stars Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard and Liam Neeson.  The film opens July 20th.  Hit the jump to see the new poster.

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: