Mars Needs Moms, a.k.a. the year's most sensationally expensive bomb to date, stumbled into its second week of release on the same 3,117 screens where it opened Mar. 11. The result was a respectable 23.1% drop from its sad, sad first frame. That's the good news. The bad news is that MNM's estimated $5.3 million gross averaged out to a sad, sad $1,706 per screen, edging Treasure Planet's $1,719 average to become Disney's worst second-week wide-release performer ever. Congrats? [Box Office Mojo]
Happy Monday! It's time to gather round the water cooler or coffee maker or keg or whatever your particular workplace offers in terms of communal morning beverage provisions and catch up about your weekend viewing. Which, if we're to believe the numbers, would suggest a trip to see Limitless.
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Also in this Monday edition of The Broadsheet: Sanctum is the latest casualty of the tsunamis in Japan... Michael Chabon may head to Disney's Magic Kingdom... Julianne Moore will become a sinister witch... and more ahead.
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Maybe the years of setbacks and production woes on The Hobbit left the rest of us wondering whether the project was cursed, but apparently Peter Jackson isn't letting any of it get him down. Production has officially commenced on the film, complete with a press release and two stills from the set. They reveal very little about the film itself, but that's not the point! The point here is that the long-delayed film is finally starting to happen and that Jackson is looking healthy and happy as he goofs around in The Shire with his Hobbit pipe. Take a look.
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More bits and pieces of Zack Snyder's upcoming Superman project emerged Sunday as the director made the press rounds with the girl power action pic Sucker Punch, another wildly fantastical, epic-scale vision from the man behind 300 and Watchmen. As Snyder told Movieline exclusively with a nod to his creative exchanges with producer Christopher Nolan, Superman will mark a stylistic departure of sorts: The comic book adventure about the flying, super-powered Man of Steel will be his most realistic film to date.
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Well, that was quick! On the heels of yesterday's news that he was officially joining the cast of The Dark Knight Rises, Variety is reporting that Joseph Gordon-Levitt will be playing Alberto Falcone, son of Tom Wilkinson's Carmine Falcone, but better known perhaps as the Holiday Killer. So what do we know about Alberto?
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It was a three-way opening battle for the box office this weekend, but in the end it was the Bradley Cooper's clever d-bag that overpowered the sincere attorney and the sassy alien as Limitless took the top spot. Said attorney and alien took fourth and fifth place respectively, as hold-overs Rango and Battle: Los Angeles took second and third place. Your weekend receipts are here.
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It wouldn't be a proper day here at the Movieline Terrordrome unless we breathlessly pass along some news from one of the eighty billion comic book movies in development. And today we've got a twofer! One from the darkest corners of Gotham City and another from the battlefields of World War II.
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While Jodie Foster the actress has a rich and varied resume -- horror! science fiction! childrens' adventure! whatever Flightplan was! -- but as a director, she's stuck to smaller, family-based dramas, including SXSW's sweetheart, The Beaver. But speaking to the Los Angles Times, Foster says she's ready to direct a sci-fi thriller. Promising that it'll have her usual Fosteresque "family element" as well as plenty of "genre moments," Foster is still chewing over the details of the script with an unnamed writer. And of course, she still has to finishing shooting Roman Polanski's Carnage as well as Neill Blomkamp's District 9 follow-up, Elysium before she can turn her eyes sci-fi-ward. But let's just hope that her next leading man isn't also an unrepentant racist, anti-Semitic, wife-beating raging homophobe. It'll make the press junket a lot simpler, I would think. [LAT]
It's going to be a bumpy weekend. A scant couple of millions separated first place Limitless from fifth place Rango in the Friday box office, with the difference between number two Battle: Los Angeles, number three Paul and fourth place Lincoln Lawyer being just a few hundred thousand. Look for a lot of jockeying for position and a lot of chest-puffing the next few days, and of course watch the numbers change as the final amounts coming pouring in. Your Friday box office is here.
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"Friii-eee-day, Friii-eee-day, gotta get down on Friii-eee-day..." And if Rebecca Black says it, then you know it's true. With that, your Movieline staff leaves you the Week in Review, a collection of exemplary entertainment coverage and the bare minimum Beaver puns allowed by law. Dixon Gaines will take over bright and early on Saturday; please join him then, and have a great weekend!
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My only quibble with Canadian tattoo artist Andrew Ottenhof's tattoo of Charlie Sheen wearing a tiger head: Charlie looks a little more like his brother Emilio. Or Emilio's friend Ally Sheedy. Or Jean-Claude Van Damme. In a bad mood. In the '80s. Otherwise? Tragnifique!
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Yesterday was Thursday, when it seems the folks at Sony were in such a good mood that they dismissed their complaints of breach of contract against the Strause brothers, VFX experts and makers of last November's indie alien invasion pic Skyline. The strongly worded charges originally accused the Strauses' Hydraulx Entertainment of using Battle: Los Angeles equipment to make their own competing sci-fi flick, but you know what helps smooth over disputes like this? Discovering that Skyline's effects were completely different from those in Battle: Los Angeles. Also: Having $35 million in your pocket.
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Queen of everything Sandra Bullock was photographed on the set of her new movie Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, looking immortal in casual curls and a turtleneck. But am I imagining something, or does she resemble a perfect hybrid of two characters from a certain 1998 film with Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon?
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No, "Kicking in the front seat / sitting in the back seat" is not a Gwendolyn Brooks couplet about Rosa Parks; it's a key line in YouTube sensation Rebecca Black's video "Friday," which is being "hailed" as the worst song ever. Honestly? It's not that bad. A little doltish and Auto-Tuned, but nothing that another wretched spin of "Boom Boom Pow" couldn't make you forget. Rebecca Black's meteoric rise (about 20 million views, so far) makes us reflect upon other questionable phenomena in pop history, the kinds whose stories still haven't been told on the big screen. Here are five we'd like to revisit.
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