Warner Bros. Pictures announced that the next installment of the Batman franchise, which we've temporarily named Batman 3, will be released on July 20, 2012.

The movie will see the return of many of the principals that made The Dark Knight a hit back in 2008. Christopher Nolan returns in the director's chair, Jonathan Nolan and David S. Goyer will be doing writing duties, and Wall Pfister will be the Cinematographer (he received an Academy Award nomination for The Dark Knight). The cast listing so far also shows familiar names, including Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, and Morgan Freeman. We can only hope that Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard will be back to write another amazing score.

There's no mention of a storyline yet, or when production will begin. Will there be a single villain, or an ensemble? At this point, we don't know. Will Nolan up the ante and make even more of the movie using IMAX cameras? I certainly hope so, but at this point, we don't know.

Answers to everyone's questions will be forthcoming, but there's a lot of time between now and the release date for the movie (809 days if you want to start keeping track). Nolan has to get Inception out the door first (it's being released on July 16th), and then I'm sure that his attention will swing towards all things Batman.