The Superbowl? Man plans, God laughs.

The weekend box office? Disney plans, Billy Ray Cyrus laughs -- all the way to the bank. The 3D concert film "Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour" grossed $29 million at 683 theaters, for a downright frightening $42,459 per-theater-average. As usual, the house that Walt built knows how to market a property like processed cheese (a decent description of Miley's music, incidentally) while increasing its value by making it look scarce. If you told a nine-year-old girl that she had only one week to see the Hannah Montana movie and that if she missed it she'd become a social leper, well, of course she'd sell her prized Zac Efron toilet plunger to see it. And of course Disney would then have to turn around Monday morning and announce "Engagement Extended Due to Overwhelming Demand". Are you listening, junior MBAs? Today's lesson is called "How to Print Money by Leveraging Pre-Pubescent Girls."

The film got decent reviews, though, and its success -- and that of U2 3D -- means we'll be seeing a lot more bulbous concert movies in the coming months. I'd love to see "Prince 3D" but we'd probably all have to wear protective raingear.

Coming in at #2 for the weekend, with less than half of the "Hannah Montana" gross, was the Jessica Alba J-horror remake "The Eye." Other newbies "Over Her Dead Body" and "Strange Wilderness" -- true first-quarter dogs -- failed to break $5 million apiece.

More grosses at the Box Office Mojo chart and Leonard Klady at Movie City News.

You may have missed this last week, but Pakistan has lifted a musty five-decade ban on India's movies being shown there legally. What this will do to the country's bootleg Bollywood DVD industry is unknown. It's also unclear whether this means the world has future Pakistan-India co-productions to look forward to. But I say give it a go, you crazy kids. If the world needs a 4-hour anti-imperialist cricket musical, aren't you two just the countries to make it happen?

(And yes, for now, this a post-Super Bowl-free zone.)

Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Fandom

Thankfully, it seems an end might be near for the writer's strike that's crippled an industry. But what if it didn't end? What if it just kept going ... and going ... and going? Well, those maniacs at Cracked asked readers to present their photo-shopped visions of the future; a future that could very well see a fictional film like the one above taking home the Oscar for best picture. There were several fan-made posters in competition, however it came down to a make- believe Brad Pitt movie eventually taking the prize. The name of said movie: The Script Reader With An Enormous C**k.

The posters are all pretty hilarious, especially the made-up quotes thrown around each one (I never knew Roger Ebert had such a vulgar vocabulary). My favorite fictional Ebert quote came on the poster for Gratuitous CG Frenzy, in which the quote was: "I don't know why the Empire State Building turned into a gigantic bear, but the fur was incredible." Other titles joining the pack include Uwe Boll's Pong, James Cameron's Exploring the Basement (in IMAX 3-D!), Not Another German Expressionism Movie (from the Wayans brothers), American Idol: The Movie, The Sims Movie (starring Ed Norton and Julia Roberts) and one called Old People Falling Down Stairs. I've provided a few of my personal favorites after the jump, but then head over to Cracked to see the rest.

[via The Movie Blog]

Continue reading The Writer's Strike Presents: The 2009 Oscar Nominees!

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LITTLE ROCK, Ark., Feb. 4, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Retro Television Network (RTN), which is owned and distributed by Equity Media Holdings Corporation (Nasdaq:EMDA), announced today that it will launch an RTN affiliate in Wichita/Hutchinson, KS. The network will begin airing in the second quarter of this year on KGPT, a Great Plains Television Network station.

Because it just needs to happen, the Coolidge is showing "Brokeback Mountain" tonight at 7pm. The layers of tragedy will, over time, accumulate around this imperfect movie and its great, deep performance -- and its greatish, deepish ones, too -- until everything about them assumes the impression of wisdom. We'll search this movie and Ennis Del Mar the way we might someone else's soul. We leave a little more devastated, a little more lost than we did the first time. You'll watch Heath Ledger and think the ache in his heart and in his bones seems realer, more contagious. Bad news has a way of doing that to an already iconic piece of acting. Have you seen "Rebel Without a Cause" lately? Of course, the Coolidge could just as easily have shown "Casanova" to remind us that the world has lost this happy, horny dude, too.

LONDON, Feb. 4, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Virgin Media (Nasdaq:VMED) will be announcing its Fourth Quarter 2007 results on Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 830am UK time, 330am ET. The company will host a conference call for analysts and investors to discuss these results on February 28, at 2pm UK time, 9am ET.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Feb. 4, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Enthusiastic indie-rock band AUDIOCRASH is releasing its debut, full-length artist album, Time Sensitive Material (Dirty Garage Records), on March 15th at SXSW. The band's sound is composed of infectious, highly memorable tunes and catchy hooks with a serious sentiment behind the lighthearted lyrics. The first single from the album, "Everyday," has lit-up the blogosphere with debate over whether it's a political song railing against an unjust war. One viewing of the song's music video might suggest the affirmative, if not for the band's insistence that the song is simply about strife and the daily sacrifices people make in order to get home to the ones they love.