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Charlotte "Charlie" Honeywell (Jennifer Lopez) meets her soon to be mother-in-law Viola Fields (Jane Fonda), who thinks no girl is good enough for her son in Monster-in-law. PHOTO: AP

Jane Fonda's return to the big screen as Jennifer Lopez's villainous prospective mother-in-law took the top box office spot in the US over the weekend.

The comedy Monster-in-Law earned US$23.1 million in its debut weekend. Another comedic take on familial combat, Kicking and Screaming, starring Will Ferrell, opened in second place with US$20.1 million, while the Jet Li action film Unleashed opened in third place with US$10.9 million.

Kingdom of Heaven came in fourth, earning US$9.6 million last weekend. The movie has made US$35 million over the past two weeks.

Kingdom stayed at the top of the British box office for the second week running with Monster-In-Law trailing in second and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which follows Englishman Arthur Dent on his space travels, was at No. 3.

Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith, which was to open in the US at 12am yesterday, looks set to break a number of box-office records. Seventy to 80 percent of seats were sold out four days in advance for opening showings at various US theater chains.

Episode III, the sixth in a 28-year cycle of Star Wars pictures, appears to have a serious shot at displacing Sony Pictures' Spider-Man as the best-opening film in history.

Spider-Man took in US$114.8 million in three days when it opened in May 2002, setting a widely discussed weekend record and eventually grossing $403.7 million at the domestic box office, short of the $601 million take of the top-grossing Titanic in 1997.

Universal Studios has become the latest studio to release movies specifically for the Sony PlayStation Portable, a handheld game device that also plays movies in a special format.

Universal said Monday it will release six titles on Universal Media Disc (UMD), the proprietary format devised by Sony for the PSP.

Sony, The Walt Disney Co. and Twentieth Century Fox have previously said they will release films on the miniature disc.

Initially the studios are releasing films that appeal to young males, the audience most likely to buy the portable games device.

Among the titles Universal will release this July are widescreen versions of Assault on Precinct 13, The Rundown, Van Helsing, Dawn of the Dead: Unrated Director's Cut, The Chronicles of Riddick: Unrated Director's Cut and The Fast and the Furious.

Studios are embracing the format because, unlike current DVDs, the new discs include robust features to prevent the movies from being illegally copied.

The UMDs, which can hold 140 minutes of DVD quality video, typically cost about US$20.

Cigarette brands still appear in movies, including films aimed at children, despite tobacco companies being barred from paying for such cameos, a study said.

The continued presence of tobacco brands in kid's movies undermined the multi-billion-dollar 1998 agreement between tobacco companies and US states that prevents companies from paying moviemakers to use their brands on screen, an author of the report said.

Dartmouth Medical School researchers viewed 400 of the top box-office movies made before the settlement and 400 movies made afterward to assess the impact of the deal.

Tobacco brands had appeared in one of every five movies before the settlement, but that dropped to one in 10 movies after the settlement, said the report, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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