If you’ve been on the internet the past 12 hours, then you know that the prologue for Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight Rises was screened for select press last night. Everyone else can see it in very select IMAX theaters next week with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, but Nolan & co. attended the screening last night and we have one major detail to report. You can look for brief write-ups of the actual footage around the web, but I’d personally want to wait to see it myself, so we won’t be sharing that.

EW.com talked to Nolan, who said they he never planned to shoot the film entirely in the IMAX format due to logistics, but he did have excellent news when it comes to how much footage we’ll actually see in the breathtaking format. Check out his quote below.

We shot about twice what we did last time [on The Dark Knight], at least. Last time we were about 25 minutes [in IMAX]. Obviously, I haven’t cut [the rest of The Dark Knight Rises] yet, so I don’t know the exact running time, but I think we’ll be in the 45 to 50 minute range. Basically all the actions sequences, and some of the more large-scale other bits of the film that aren’t necessarily action. We even shot some dialogue scenes and some quite intimate dramatic scenes, which we haven’t done before. And so some of that will make its way into the film.

Forget 3D, this is technology Hollywood should be pushing. If you were lucky enough to see The Dark Knight in IMAX, then you know how overwhelmingly jaw-dropping the experience can be. Although he admitted he has barely begun editing it, I’d expect Nolan’s final entry to be between the 2.5 to 3-hour runtime, so we’d see about a third of it in the IMAX format. This is one of the main reasons I’m excited for Brad Bird‘s Ghotocol next week, considering about 25 minutes of that film was shot in his high-quality format.

There is also a viral launching in about two hours as of this posting, so I’m sure we’ll have another update soon. I’ve heard conflicting reports of whether it is the new, official trailer or not. We know that will definitely be attached to Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and runs 2 minutes and 3 seconds, but I’d doubt WB would launch it this early. We’ll see.

Starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Juno Temple, Josh Pence, Daniel Sunjata, Nestor Carbonell, Matthew Modine, Tom Conti, Joey King, Brett Cullen, Chris Ellis, Josh Stewart, Christopher Judge, Adam Rodriguez and Rob BrownThe Dark Knight Rises hits theaters July 20th, 2012.

Are you excited about the possibilities of IMAX?

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