• Hollywood loves the energy crisis! Not only is there evidence that “higher gas prices boost boxoffice by prompting consumers to opt for the local multiplex over longer trips,” but foreign oil investors, prompted by a desire to avoid taxes on windfall profits, “look more favorably on the film biz — any film, really — because it means that even if a movie loses, say, 20% or 30% of its money, investors still come out on top because those losses pale compared with what a government might have taken.”
• “There’s a superhero summit under way at Warner Bros,” says David S. Cohen at Variety, as the studio and subsidiary DC Comics meet to work out a “master plan” for shilling superheroes going forward.
• The Chinese censorship board is demanding that cuts be made to the third Mummy movie––which shot for three months in China, and incorporates a replica of the Great Wall––but they’re not publicly specifying what it’ll take to let the film be shown in the country. Is anyone else starting to suspect that the Chinese censors just have really good taste?
• The AMPTP won’t accept any of SAG’s counter-offers, and SAG won’t settle for the AMPTP’s “final” deal. So what now? No one knows for sure, but with SAG members continuing to work with no contract, it’s possible that the studios will “declare an impasse and impose the terms and conditions of the new offer.”

• Robert Downey Jr will go straight from Iron Man victory lap to Guy Ritchie’s brave attempt to overcome his wife’s fatal pull Sherlock Holmes movie. The project is being fasttracked in order to beat that other Sherlock Holmes movie, the one with Will Farrell and Borat, to the screen.
• So much for “final offers”: the day after AFTRA ratified their deal with the studios, news breaks that the AMPTP has offered SAG a $10 million, retroactive-to-July 1 bonus if they agree to ratify the contract by August 15.
• The NY Times is getting a cash infusion by selling the development rights of their stories to Hollywood studios. The most recent story to go on the block (and the 15th in two years) is “This Strange Thing Called Prom,” a June 22 piece about students at a multi-culti Brooklyn high school preparing for the big night. Miramax bought it, but hasn’t yet attached any talent.

• Hancock made $107.3 million over the five night weekend, giving the Will Smith fractured superhero tale the third best July 4th opening of all time. It’s considered a victory for Smith’s star power, but it’s still almost $50 million less than Spider-Man 2 managed in a similar time frame. Meanwhile, The Wackness enjoyed the highest per-screen average of the weekend, earning $24,177 on each of its 6 screens.
• SAG is expected to make an announcement today about AMPTP’s “final offer”––although they might just announce that they need more time to think it over. Meanwhile, at a press conference at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival over the weekend, Robert DeNiro argued against a strike, accusing his fellow actors of not having “done their homework” on the economics. “I do not know if it is the right time to be doing this at all with the economy the way it is,” he warned.
• The opera directed by David Cronenberg based on his movie version of The Fly is bombing with French critics. Though complaints regarding the score’s “lack of expertise and imagination” have damaged ticket sales somewhat, apparently “Cronenberg diehards, Paris’ trendy 30ish art crowd and a sprinkling of goth girls” are still coming out in full force.

• The Screen Actors Guild are currently without a contract. The AMPTP offered a “final offer” late yesterday in hopes of nailing the union down before their previous contract expired at midnight, but SAG insisted on giving the “deeply flawed” proposal the once-over before meeting with the studios on Wednesday. They’re probably just stalling until AFTRA votes on their tentative deal with the AMPTP next week.
• Variety takes note of the summer’s box office sleepers thus far, including The Strangers, which has quietly crossed $50 million, and What Happens in Vegas, an alleged bomb which nonetheless will almost certainly make close to $100 million.
• The Gillian Anderson comeback train rolls on. The X Files star has acquired a biography of Martha Gellhorn for her to star in and her production company to adapt. Gellhorn was a pioneering war correspondant and sometime wife of Ernest Hemingway.
• Philip Noyce will likely direct Edwin A Salt, a thriller in which Tom Cruise will play a “CIA officer who’s accused by a defector of being a Russian sleeper spy. He must elude capture long enough to clear his name.” Yes, Tom Cruise has now become so boring that news of his next project is relegated to the bottom of the roundup. Such is the way of the world, I guess.

Have you been following The Hollywood Temp Diaries? It’s an anonymous Blogger blog with the tagline, “I am one of those barnacles on the hull of the good ship ‘Hollywood.’ These are my stories.” Good stuff, especially if you subscribe to that dirty secret that most Hollywood jobs are just as glamorous and exciting as, like, working anywhere else. The blog’s author, known only as Temp X, has been drawing a direct line between the impending SAG strike and total global apocalypse for awhile. A couple of days ago, s/he posted a “videotorial” to hammer home her/his case, and for people like me who haven’t been able to get it up to care much about an actor’s strike, it’s the perfect vehicle for impressing the seriousness of the situation. More here.

• Wanted opened to $51.1 million over the weekend, which is, you know, a fantastic boost for Angelina Jolie’s live-action bankability, but it wasn’t enough to beat Wall-E‘s $62.5 mil for first place. Speaking of boosts: The Last Mistress made $17,596 on each of its screens, which is roughly $17 for every time Asia Argento shows her debatably authentic boobs in it.
• SAG says they’re not going on strike and any suggestions in that vein coming from the AMPTP are merely “scare tactics.” The AMPTP says SAG is responsible for The End of Hollywood As We Know It. Or, more accurately: “The industry is shutting down because SAG’s Hollywood leadership insisted on 11th-hour negotiations and dragging these talks into July so they can continue attacking AFTRA.”
• Prince of Broadway and Loot took the big narrative and documentary prizes, respectively, at the Los Angeles Film Festival over the weekend. The Wackness and Man on Wire won the audience awards. In other fest news, Wim Wenders, director of the most maligned competition film last month at Cannes, will head the jury at the Venice Film Festival.

• April 15 certainties: someone will die, Karina will weep as the IRS cleans out her checking account, and SAG will meet with the AMPTP to begin talks to head off a strike.
• Woah! Up until now, the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping trial has been painfully boring, mostly because we already had an inkling that Courtney Love was willing to spend money to justify her paranoia. But yesterday, Adam Sender testified that Pellicano had offered to have Aaron Russo, a producer with whom Sender had a business falling out, “murdered on the way back from Las Vegas.” Say it with me now: !!!
• If you are a Stan Lee nerd, or one of those people who is painfully obsessed with the Walt Disney Company’s every move, this Variety story might mean something to you.

The WGA strike is over, the Director’s Guild just signed an agreement, eyes turn to the the Screen Actors Guild whose contract expires this June and everyone is making statements laden with slippery subtext.

The Writers Guild made a statement about how their contract is ratified and everyone can expect them to work well with others now. P.S. Thanks to all the actors, producers and directors who lost work because of the strike. (Translation: We’ll be really, really, really cooperative with studios now. Unless, of course, our Screen Actor’s Guild brothers and sisters hit the picket line this summer.)

An AMPTP (studios) statement basically says what a pleasure it has been to work with the Director’s Guild. (Translation: If SAG strikes this summer, they’ll look like the thespian prima-donnas they are.)

CBS’s CEO makes a statement saying the strike was great! Kind of like a bad stomach flu that gets you to your bathing suit weight, CBS had no idea how much money it was wasting on writing new shows until they tightened their belts for strike time. Meanwhile, NBC leaves dozens biting their nails as Vegas’ season finale cliffhanger becomes strike casualty. (Translation: No more posh gigs for strikers.)

• Universal has declined to renew their production deal with Tom Shadyac, who directed a number of massive comedy hits for the studio, including The Nutty Professor and Liar, Liar. Shadyac clashed with the studio over his latest directorial effort, last summer’s Evan Almighty, which grossed almost $200 million worldwide but cost at least that much to make.
• The AMPTP wants to negotiate with SAG. George Clooney wants the AMPTP to negotiate with SAG. So what’s the problem? SAG national exec director Doug Allen is in no hurry to start formal talks. He says the guild needs to complete internal meetings on wages and working conditions, and he won’t have anything to bring to the AMPTP until those meetings conclude in March.
• In a column on the growth of online film distribution, Anne Thompson says there’s still not enough money to be made in the market to interest major the brick-and-mortar distribution stalwarts, “Which means that this movement will continue to build from the bottom up with micro-indies, not from the top down with real studio investment.”

• The strike may not be legally over, but in an industry desperate to return to some sense of normalcy, this is apparently the sound of a fat lady singing: The WGA’s still needs their members to officially vote on the new AMPTP deal, but TV showrunners are nonetheless expected to return to work today, with regular writers back in the office on Wednesday. More in our frame of concern, the Oscars will go forth with writers and without picket lines.
• Meanwhile, writers seem to generally think the prolonged strike, which will net them each about $1500 per streamed television episode, was “worth it,” nevermind the losses incurred by those crew members who lost their jobs, or the hit taken to the Hollywood economy as a whole. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the strike is responsible for up to $2 billion in local losses.
• Fool’s Gold easily beat holdover Hannah Montana at the box office this weekend, with a respectable $22 million. Meanwhile, the Paris Hilton-starrer The Hottie and the Nottie, which garnered some of the best bad reviews I’ve read in a while (why did they even screen it for critics?), earned a disastrous $234 on each of its 111 screens.
• Berlin deals: Arthouse Films has acquired Christina Clausen’s doc The Universe of Keith Haring; the Jason Statham crime pic The Bank Job sold release rights to various distributors in 40 territories.

The WGA and the AMPTP apparently reached a tentative deal sometime between 3 and 4 AM PST this morning.  Nikki Finke (who, BTW, really knows how to rock the stock photography) seemed to say in her last post that last night’s talks eliminate the need for tonight’s proposed bi-coastal WGA meetings, but as of this morning United Hollywood says those meetings are still on. Everyone seems to be stopping *just* short of saying the strike is definitively over. Variety has the full points of the proposed deal in PDF form (it will begin to download when you click that link), and United Hollywood [via indieWIRE] has the letter sent by WGA West president Patrick Varone to union members early this morning.

• Throwing a wrench into the WGA talks that neither side really needed, SAG has started talking shit about the recently-cemented DGA/AMPTP deal. SAG’s Alan Rosenberg wrote a letter to his guild warning them that the publicized details of the DGA pact were too vague to put much faith in, and that the pact may not actually be a victory on the digital download front. The DGA’s Michael Apted responded (and I’m paraphrasing), “If you don’t know the details, how come you’re sending letters, gettin’ all up our shit?”
• Variety has scant new details on Mark Romanek’s exit from Universal’s Wolfman remake: in this case, “creative differences” seem to translate to “money.”
• Oliver Stone’s not just talking about making a George Bush movie––he’s now found someone to fully finance the thing, so that it can be fast tracked into production by April, and possibly in theaters in time for the November election. Chris previously did a double take on this project here.

• Will the strike motivate buyers to stock up on content, or will the rough recent art house climate discourage them from picking up all but the safest work? When it comes to the marketplace at the Sundance Film Festival (which begins today), all that seems certain is that star heavy, light-leaning comedies like What Just Happened? and Sunshine Cleaning are expected to have an easier time leaving Park City with a deal. So, in other words, no news to report yet.
• AMPAS is planning two separate Oscar shows: one in case the WGA makes nice with the studios or grants them a waiver to use writers, and an “alternative” strike-proof telecast. Oscar telecast producer Gil Cates is keeping quiet on what form the “alternative” show could take, but Variety speculates that it would probably “rely on industry heavyweights penning their own speeches and presenting the awards.”
• “Anticipation of a DGA deal is amping up the pressure from all sides on the leadership of the Writers Guild,” says Dave McNary. The AMPTP is expected to hand down an offer this week, and writers are apparently threatening that they’ll resign from the WGA and go “financial core,” allowing them to go back to work without union protections, if the DGA rejects it out of hand.

• In a piece that reads like AMPTP damage control, Variety quotes a number of sources who burst the bubble on the interim side deals the WGA has been brokering with independent producers. A former TV exec sniffs that the UA deal “isn’t generating much in terms of employment” asmidst predictions that instead of brokering deals to produce new content, studios would rather go to Sundance and buy up anything half-way releasable that’s available.
• The Online Film Critics Society broke from convention by awarding their Best Documentary prize to Seth Gordon’s The King of Kong, which was one of the best reviewed non-fiction films of 2007 but has failed to drum up much end-of-year awards attention. Other than that, the OFCS bestowed awards on the usual suspects: No Country For Old Men, Daniel Day-Lewis, Julie Christie and Diablo Cody.
• HBO may back out of their day-to-day participation in Picturehouse, the indie arm that currently operates as a joint venture between the cable giant and Time Warner’s New Line.  One issue is that films produced with HBO funds and distributed by Picturehouse are not performing as well as films that Picturehouse has acquired at festivals. Another, is that HBO is denying their partners the first chance to distribute Sugar, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s anticipated follow-up to Half Nelson, so that they can premiere the film for other buyers at Sundance.