Encouraged perhaps by his giggles 'n' dick jokes success on Saturday Night Live (but probably not), movie hut Anchor Bay has picked up distribution rights to Justin Timberlake's little indie drama movie in which a son (Timbz) reconciles with his estranged dad (Jeff "BeeBo" Bridges) at his dead mom's behest. It's called The Open Road, and it's about a soul-searching road trip. Yep. It's one of those. [Variety]

Chris Hardwick, so very late of MTV's Singled Out (and current [?] of Attack of the Show), will be hosting a new show called Web Soup on G4, which is done by the people from The Soup, but is about the internet rather than television. So now you can watch a show on TV that is about the internet. Gurgle. [Variety]

Pixar, which holds the keys to a magical otherworld where everything looks like computers but only opens the door and lets us peek in every year or so, is opening up offices in Vancouver. Vancouver is a place in a country called Canada where most movies are filmed, usually movies that only refer vaguely to "a city." Everyone will be mildly happy and then it will rain and somewhere Doug Coupland will start writing a book about animation. [Variety]

Eddie Kay Thomas, the guy who likes to boff old ladies in those American Pie documentaries, has been cast in a show that sounds more horrible than that first glimpse of puckered, withery elderflesh. It's called How to Make It In America. He'll play a rich former nerd who really still wants to be cool (because that's never been done before). It also costars Bryan Greenberg, that unfortunate hunk of high school bologna from Unscripted and the overly scripted Prime. Hell. This show sounds like hell. [THR]

The likable Matthew Goode has landed a role in the Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant dramedy about insurance men Cemetery Junction. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be thankful that Goode's not wearing a skintight nipple suit (or will you?). [THR]

Warner Brothers is hoping that Facebook will make more people want to buy Watchmen on DVD. [THR]

Ryan Seacrest and Jamie Oliver are putting together a reality show in which the Naked Chef helps whole towns not be fat. The first town? Couchville, USA. Population: Me. (I hope) [THR]

Antonio Banderas is making another movie no one will ever see. [Variety]

WHAT'S NEW: The primary competition for The Dark Knight's second weekend will be... itself. You have to feel for Sony and Fox for dropping Step Brothers and X-Files: I Want to Believe opposite History's Greatest Film, but that's just the kind of extraordinary season it's been. Those films will perform decently enough, though — roughly $30 million for the Judd Apatow-produced Ferrell/Reilly comedy, $21 million for the sci-fi franchise adaptation — which is another bummer for Fox, which has only its overachieving The Happening to show for a long, lean summer at the box office.

Also opening this weekend are the concert/protest film CSNY: Deja Vu; the oversexed '60s groupie chronicle Eight Miles High; Nanette Burstein's controversial pseudo-doc American Teen; the small-town gardener doc (seriously) A Man Called Pearl; and Minnie Driver's middling psychological drama Take.

THE BIG LOSER: Not so much a "loser" as a handicapping interest of ours, Christian Bale's reported mum-thumping exploits — however blown out of proportion the actually are — could drop The Dark Knight a few percentage points more than it otherwise would have. But even if plunges by 50% (which it won't), it'll still nab $80 million, so again, save your pity for Fox.

THE UNDERDOG: When news hit in 2006 that director Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots, Becoming Jane) was taking on an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited, skeptics seemed less anxious about a perversion of the author's elegant, class-crash tragedy than how the film would stand up to the epochal 1981 miniseries adaptation. We don't have time or space to even touch that, but it hardly seems to matter: Jarrold's Brideshead bites deep into the love triangle between middle-class Charles Ryder and the Catholic-burdened Flyte siblings Julia and Sebastian, aided by a cast of young British talent led by Hayley Atwell, Ben Whishaw and the extraordinary Matthew Goode (The Lookout, Match Point). Emma Thompson drops in as well for a stirring matron act, but it's Jarrold's scope and Goode's tone harmonizing so dynamically here that you almost can't imagine this story ever required nine hours to tell.

FOR SHUT-INS: Among this week's new DVD's are the Gen-Y card-counting drama 21; the nifty Famke Janssen pool-shark indie Turn the River; the taut enviro-horror sleeper The Last Winter; and, at last, complete series collection of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's Spaced.

So is this your week to catch up on The Dark Knight? Or do you, as Fox so desperately hopes, want to believe? Can Step Brothers actually have more gags than those in its trailer? Go ahead — call your shots now before the August doldrums come to claim us all.