i am legend

Resurgent Anne Hathaway Back in ‘Love’

7:00AM STV | In her first film since her split with Raffaello Follieri, Anne Hathaway will topline The Opposite of Love as an attorney whose life collapses when she rejects her boyfriend’s marriage interests. That kind of thing will happen when you say “No” to a Vatican wedding. [Variety] Memo to Will Smith and Warner Bros. re your planned I Am Legend prequel: Save $149,999,996 and rent the original. It has flashbacks and everything! [Variety] After the jump: Spielberg contemplates sci-fi, Travolta visits Paris, and at last! Fag hags get a show of their own! More »

‘Sex and the City’ Wins ‘Whore of the Year’ and Other Notable Product Placement Honors

5:55AM STV | The soul-deadening imposition of commercial brands on your moviegoing experience got even more shameless this morning when the oft-overlooked ring of Hell know as “brandcameo” unveiled the winners of its fourth annual Product Placement Awards. You could probably guess at least most of the heavyweight competitors — your Apples, your Fords, your Manolos — from a glance at the last year’s worth of releases, but that doesn’t make the year’s findings any less remarkable in context: The surveyors counted an average of 22.1 brands in each of the 20 films this year to have a No. 1 weekend at the box office. That number is down from 2007, when an average of nearly 25 brands were counted among the year’s 32 top releases. More »

Trade Roundup: The Return Of Late Night, Now With Added Trump

9:16AM Defamer Hollywood | The Return of Late Night (*Doc Severinson trumpet flourish*) brings a veritable who-cares of stars willing to cross picket lines. Leno has Jamie Lynn Spears’-pregnancy-endorsing candidate Mike Huckabee, and Letterman has Donald Trump, on hand to find out which of his Celebrity Apprentice candidates float. [THR] Overseas audiences still can’t get enough of I Am Legend, which foreign film snoots are calling the greatest exploration of the existentialist dilemma since 1948’s La Terra trema. [Variety] More »

Hollywood Box Office: ‘Book Of Secrets’ The ‘Citizen Kane’ Of American-History-Themed Bruckheimer Thrill Rides

8:04AM Defamer Hollywood | With Father Time currently in lockdown after being picked up over the weekend for a parole-violating DUI, and the tragic discovery of the New Year’s baby in a dumpster behind Bar Lubitsch (besides a crushed top hat and filthy sash, doing just fine), it seems as if the countdown to 2008 comes under less than ideal circumstances. Still, you can’t stop the march of progress, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the weekend box office numbers: More »

Nicolas Cage Is A National Treasure

8:08AM Defamer Hollywood | On these final few hours before the sugarplum-gorging orgy that begins at dawn, we dutifully tabulate for you, like a trembling Bob Cratchit scratching figures with a quill pen into the margins of the Scrooge & Marley ledger, the weekend’s box office numbers: 1. National Treasure: Book of Secrets – $US45.5 million Frankly, we don’t know what took infallible superproducer Jerry Bruckheimer and supermuse Nicolas Cage this long to bring us another Treasure chapter: With Secrets conquering this weekend’s box office (and bringing in $US10 mil more than the original), the American-history-corrupting adventure serial has now graduated to official franchise&trade status. We’re eagerly anticipating all future installments, including National Treasure: Three Dollar Bill, in which Cage and his ragtag band of bookish fortune-hunters discover that the Lincoln Memorial’s head spins to the left when a Sacagawea and Susan B. Anthony dollar are placed in its orbital sockets, revealing a secret tunnel to J. Edgar Hoover’s fabled lingerie closet. More »

US Box Office: Will Smith Saves A Strike-Plagued Hollywood From Year-End Disaster

8:20AM Defamer Hollywood | We knew that Hollywood wouldn’t allow itself to limp out of 2007 on the back of a crippled, armoured polar bear–celebrate the studios’ late-year resurrection with a quick perusal of the weekend’s box office numbers: 1. I Am Legend – $US76.535 million If there was any question that Will Smith is the Biggest Movie Star in the World, (a title we’re fond of ironically bestowing upon the likes of Shia LeBeouf when slow weekends at the multiplex briefly brighten Hollywood’s lesser lights), let I Am Legend remove all remaining doubt. In perhaps his most impressive achievement yet, Smith saved a turnaround-plagued project, gave it a a Castaway meets 28 Days Later spin by substituting an adorable German Shepherd for a volleyball given life-force by a blood-smeared smiley face, and shattered™ the December opening weekend record once held by Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. More »