Face it: We’re all going to see The Dark Knight Rises. Any nerd worth his weight in Batarangs is going to want to know how director Christopher Nolan concludes his trilogy.

But by the time it hits theaters in summer 2012, will we already have seen too much? Nolan and the film’s studio, Warner Bros., have been very meticulous about the images they release to the public, but the photo and video leaks coming from the film’s location shoots have hit critical mass.

We’ve seen cellphone video of explosions in a football stadium, long-lens shots of Batman fighting Bane and grainy set photos of the movie’s other stars. Now that Nolan has wrapped filming in Pittsburgh, almost-daily leaks are coming from the movie’s Los Angeles set.

And The Dark Knight Rises is just the beginning, as we’ve seen a recent rash of photos and videos from the Cleveland set of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers and the Illinois set of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel (the Superman reboot even has its own unofficial Facebook page). Hollywood never cared so much about the Midwest.

We hate to say it, but this may be one of those times when technology is straight-up ruining something. That’s not to say that we don’t obsessively follow just as many developments as everyone else, but at what point will we hit too much of a good thing? Will ingesting a steady diet of blurry set photos and TMZ videos of Catwoman gaffes kill our collective nerd-boners long before our first date (aka opening night)?

Darren Franich at Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch blog hypothesized that the answer was a pretty clear “yes” a few weeks ago, noting that these days film buffs “talk about movies for a full year in advance; then, we finally see the movie, and the conversation essentially stops.”

Partially this is the fault of the internet. Twitter, Ain’t It Cool News and the 24-hour news cycle have created a churn rate for new information on upcoming films that is only rivaled by the Lord of Darkness’ quest for unicorns in Legend.

Nerd-favorite movies are sure to drum up interest online. Tony Ambrose, aka YouTuber TheDarkKnightOhio, has been posting cellphone videos from The Avengers shoot in Cleveland. He discovered first-hand how intense geeks’ interest is in the 2012 crop of superhero movies.

“I didn’t publicize the first few videos I took except to post them on YouTube and share them with friends on Facebook,” said the Clevelander in an e-mail to Wired.com. “I found out [later] through a co-worker that comicbookmovie.com had found them and used them in a post. I expected some people to like the videos but didn’t expect as much attention as it got.”

The other culprits in the spoiler deluge, if they can be called that, are the cheap and easy availability of high-quality photo equipment and the handy broadcasting tools nearly all of us carry daily in the form of smartphones.

“The immediate access that everybody has via these mobile devices has really become a source of problems for most productions and nobody has really come up with the perfect way to solve it,” Dawn Keezer, director of the Pittsburgh Film Office, said in an interview with Wired.com.

Keezer, who until a week or so ago had been in effect hosting The Dark Knight Rises in her town, said the movie’s crowd control had been the most intense she’s seen in 17 years of bringing films to Pittsburgh.

“In the old days what they would tell you is, ‘You can’t bring your camera to set,’” Keezer said. “It hasn’t been that long since cellphones didn’t have cameras in them — now they all have cameras. It’s something that has to be discussed on every production now.”

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