Ben Stiller to Find the Heart in Nigerian Internet Scams

· Dear Friend,

My names are Ben Stiller. We are making this venture proposal to you in strict confidence. The script we have in our possession is called Help Me Spread Goodness, a comic drama to be directed humbly my myself about a generous and merciful American banker who falls for a Nigerian internet scam. (Please don't be confusing this with Freshman Roommates, Tracy Morgan's Nigerian internet scam movie.) A swift acknowledgment on the receipt of this mail will be appreciated.

Thank you and God bless you. [Variety]

More Hollywood Ink after the jump.

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Catfight! Catfight!

At long last, we can put all that mildly nauseating talk about the corrosive effects of Wolverine leaks behind us: The hairy Canadian freak with the built-in rotisserie forearms has proven triumphant at the box office. The results are after the jump.

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The Wolverine at the Door

So what if half the world has already seen X-Men Origins: Wolverine via bootleg: There's no substitute for the multiplex, where the summer movie season got a head start Friday with an estimated $35 million opening for X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Business should taper off slightly as the weekend rolls on, but don't expect much of a chase from girlfriend-haunted Matthew McConaughey in second place. Or the non-placing Battle For Terra, either, which at $250,000 for Friday is flirting with Delgo levels of futility for a wide-release animated film. More on that on Monday...

1. X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE: $35,000,000 (new)

2. GHOSTS OF GIRLFRIENDS PAST: $5,810,000 (new)

3. OBSESSED: $4,150,000 ($38,952,000)

4. 17 AGAIN $1,980,000 ($44,122,000)

5. THE SOLOIST: $1,675,000 ($14,183,000)

6. FIGHTING: $1,450,000 ($14,783,000)

7. MONSTERS VS. ALIENS $1,300,000 ($177,905,000)

8. EARTH (2009): $1,250,000 ($18,914,000)

9. STATE OF PLAY: $1,100,000 ($28,328,000)

10. HANNAH MONTANA THE MOVIE: $1,100,000 ($67,882,000)

Figures courtesy of Box Office Mojo.

Our Commenters of the Week Win a Date with Shia LaBeouf's Mom!

In the three short weeks since we resurrected Movieline, you've enthralled us with your real time feedback. So much so, in fact, that we felt it was time to start acknowledging and rewarding the best of the bon mots to appear in our commenting section. So without further ado, we'd like to call to order the first gala presentation of the Movieline Commenty Awards! Each winner will receive an engraved trophy (a 12-inch sculpture of a unisex office worker hunched over a computer monitor snickering to his or herself as they take a bite of a Hostess Donette, cast in the finest pewter), and a special prize. In this case: a date with the sexiest ethereal angel on the planet, Shia LaBeouf's mom! Our winners are after the jump.
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Rating the Vulcan Salutes from Last Night's Star Trek Premiere

Bravo to whatever enterprising photographer made last night's Star Trek red carpet more awkward by yelling out, "DO THE VULCAN SALUTE!" Fortunately, a motley crew of celebrities obliged. Let's see who mastered the tricky finger position, and who reinterpreted the directive to be, "Do the Vulcan salute, but make it kinda dyslexic."
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In Which We Get Out of the Way and Let Shia LaBeouf's Fantastically Perverse Playboy Interview Do the Talking

Shia LaBeouf was the subject of a new Playboy interview (June issue), in which the charismatic Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen star and occasional public nuisance opened up on a number of topics with an alarming amount of candor.

Some highlights:

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Tom Cruise Lives! Or Does He?

Last year, just after the 19th release-date change for Valkyrie and just before the dramatic front-office fissures that rocked United Artists, many observers diagnosed Tom Cruise's career as terminally ill. Would he have time, though, to say his goodbyes to the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Matt Lauer, and so many other aggrieved souls among the American public? And would he put up a fight to survive? Does Scientology even allow that? Kim Masters suggests yes, yes and yes.
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Buzz Break: What Makes Jeff Probst Wet

· Jeff Probst indulges in some oversharing in his EW blog: "MINI ORGASM: More rain. Wasn't very hard but it did make me a little moist. The rain. The rain made me moist. Relax everybody. Please don't waste your time writing to tell me I'm a pervert. I just ignore those posts."

· Can we just consider ABC's Flash Forward to be greenlit already? They're looking for writers, they ran viral ads on Lost this week...hell, the TV Guide audience is probably well underway on a "Save Our Show" campaign at this point (flooding ABC executives with pried-off fast-forward buttons, maybe?).

· Get excited: Millionaire Matchmaker Patti Sanger is going to makes us hate gay people!

· Las Vegas entertainer Danny Gans passed away unexpectedly today.

· Desperate caterers at the Star Trek premiere boldly go where no one had gone before on that day: to Whole Foods, for some emergency hummus.

Much-Anticipated Iron Man 2 Photo Basically Could Have Come From Iron Man 1

Now, this is how you do marketing in the Twitter age. On Wednesday, director Jon Favreau set the Twittersphere abuzz by announcing (in under 140 characters), "First official pic from IM2 will run in USA Today on Friday. I'll post a link." The fanboy press went wild, posting news updates about the miraculous, anticipated event, counting down the hours until, surely, USA Today would premiere a photo of Scarlett Johansson and Mickey Rourke having sex on the Iron Man costume while Kate Mara held up a sign saying, "I'm playing Captain America." And what happened?
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Jodie Foster Circling The Beaver

· Remember The Beaver, the #1 Black Listed script about a down-and-out guy that finds a beaver puppet in a dumpster that begins talking to him and slowly taking over his life? Steve Carell was supposedly attached to star, but apparently that was a "loose" attachment, and now the leading candidate is ... drumroll ... Jim Carrey. It's all director dependent, however, and one director in particular who's shown interest is Jodie Foster. Hey -- you in the back row. What are you snickering about? [THR]
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Hugh Jackman and Matthew McConaughey in Mutant Stand-Off at Multiplex

Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your guide to everything new, noteworthy and heroically beclawed at the the movies. This week: Hugh Jackman and Matthew McConaughey duel at the the multiplex, some all-star animation goes awry, and Jim Jarmusch sits the whole thing out in Spain.

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Rolling Over and Playing Dead

· This is the poster for Disney's Old Dogs, in which a mild mannered executive (Robin Williams) wakes one morning to discover he can't do better than playing fifth-banana to John Travolta, two kids, and a dog. Everyone on this poster looks pretty sad about their careers. Especially the dog. [Paul Scheer]
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Virtual Newsstand: Movieline.com, April 2009

Inspired by Movieline's print legacy and the savvy curatorial skills of our former bunkmates at Kotaku, we'll end every month by compiling the best of our exclusive interviews, features and reviews into one handy, online digest. Click through for an astonishingly magazine-like Movieline experience. Remember those?

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Also Not In Theatrical Cut of Wolverine: Hugh Jackman's Genitalia

In another, noble attempt to distract from Wolverine LeakGate, Hugh Jackman stopped by the Howard Stern show today for a no-holds-barred conversation that was mainly about the adamantium-reinforced bone claw currently found in his pants, if you know what I mean. Jackman teased that there exists Wolverine footage with several different cameos from his, uh, Swordfish (does that work? has it been too long?), but that he's now in possession of all that celluloid. The conversation, as transcribed by the deliciously mundane Marksfriggin.com:
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Charles in Charge Star to Save American Economy

Go on...
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