News Briefs

"Breaking Bad" is gone, but Walter White may be coming back to television.

"Breaking Bad" creator Vince Gilligan said Thursday at Comic-Con that there is an excellent chance that the Bryan Cranston character and Aaron Paul's Jesse Pinkman will be in the show's spinoff "Better Call Saul" at some point.

Gilligan, Cranston and Paul were joined by many of their fellow "Breaking Bad" castmates in the 6,500-seat Hall H to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the show.

Gilligan said the characters will not appear in season 4 of "Better Call Saul" when it picks up in August.

"We don't want to jerk folks around," Gilligan said. "But we would be sorely remiss if these characters didn't appear in the show before it ended."

"Better Call Saul" is a prequel spinoff of "Breaking Bad" that tracks the rise of a struggling lawyer played by Bob Odenkirk into the go-to attorney for top criminals in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

"Breaking Bad" aired for five seasons on AMC, earning Cranston four outstanding drama actor Emmy Awards for his role as White. Paul won three supporting actor Emmys.

Paul brought his infant daughter onstage wearing a yellow hazmat suit and respirator like the one his character donned on the show while making meth.

"I miss you all, I miss the show," he told his former co-stars at one point.

Cranston also said that "Breaking Bad" will never be a feature film, but Gilligan countered not to rule it out.

"The Dark Knight" is returning to the big screen — actually, four of the biggest ones — in celebration of its 10th anniversary.

Warner Bros. announced Wednesday that the middle film in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy will be shown on IMAX screens in Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco and Toronto for one week beginning Aug. 24.

The theaters chosen will play the movie in the 70mm IMAX film format that Nolan used for some of the film's action sequences. He has used the format in two of his subsequent movies, "Interstellar" and last year's World War II epic, "Dunkirk."

"The Dark Knight" features Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker, which won him a posthumous Oscar.

Warner Bros. says tickets for the opening-day showings will go on sale Friday.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is raising "serious concerns" about Sinclair's $3.9 billion deal for Tribune's television stations.

Sinclair wants to buy Tribune Media and its 42 TV stations, including KTLA in Los Angeles and WPIX in New York. To address potential antitrust concerns, Sinclair has said it would sell stations to several buyers.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says Sinclair might still be able to operate the stations "in practice, even if not in name." One potential buyer is the Cunningham Group, which has ties to Sinclair's founding family.

Pai is ordering a hearing on Sinclair's proposed acquisition of Tribune. Even ordering a hearing could stop a potential deal. The last deal an FCC hearing blocked was a 2002 merger of satellite TV companies DirecTV and Echostar.

Papa John's, which has featured founder John Schnatter as the face of the company in logos and TV ads, is pulling his image from its marketing after reports he used a racial slur. 

His face was off at least some materials by late morning Friday, though the company said the details and exact timing for everything were still being worked out. The pizza chain said there are no plans to change its name.

Schnatter is still on the board and is the company's largest shareholder — meaning he remains a key presence. Papa John's has acknowledged in regulatory filings that Schnatter's public role as its pitchman could be a liability if his reputation was damaged. The company got a taste of that last year, when Schnatter stepped down as CEO after blaming disappointing pizza sales on the outcry surrounding football players kneeling during the national anthem.

This week, Papa John's was already trying to further publicly distance itself from Schnatter after Forbes reported he used the N-word during a conference call in May. Schnatter apologized and said he would resign as chairman. That prompted the company's stock to recover some of the losses it suffered after the report, and shares were up less than 1 percent Friday. Schnatter owns nearly 30 percent of the stock.

In addition to appearing in TV ads, Schnatter's image has been on packaging and at the center of a logo that usually was all over the website of the Louisville, Kentucky-based company.

Keith Hollingsworth, a professor with Morehouse College's business department, said keeping Schnatter in the marketing and advertising would signal to people that the company does not have a problem with his comments, or that it doesn't think they are a big deal.

"Five years from now, they might be able to start bringing him back. But at the moment, you have to be very decisive and show you take this very seriously," Hollingsworth said.

Schnatter had used the slur during a media training exercise, Forbes said. When asked how he would distance himself from racist groups, Schnatter reportedly complained that Colonel Sanders never faced a backlash for using the word. Schnatter subsequently issued a statement acknowledging the use of "inappropriate and hurtful" language.

"Regardless of the context, I apologize," the statement said.

The fallout from his comments continued Friday. The University of Louisville said it will remove the Papa John's name from its football stadium, and that it will rename the John H. Schnatter Center for Free Enterprise at its business college. Earlier in the week, the school said Schnatter resigned from its board of trustees.

Major League Baseball had also said it was indefinitely suspending a promotion with Papa John's that offered people discounts at the pizza chain after a player hit a grand slam.

Papa John's International Inc. began operations in 1984 and had more than 5,200 locations globally. The company cannot afford to alienate customers, with sales already under pressure from rivals such as Domino's. For the first three months of this year, Papa John's said a key sales figure fell 5.3 percent in North America.