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.
PHOTO: AP
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.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would