• Ahhh! Between Adam Sandler pretending to be Israeli and Jack Black pretending to be cute, nobody knows who’s going to win the weekend box office! Will 8 year-olds be able to clear their schedules to see both?!?!?
• Serial Andrew Lloyd Webber enabler Cameron Macintosh will co-produce a remake of My Fair Lady, starring Keira Knightley in the Julie Andrews role. Though the producers say they’ll keep the story set in 1912, they’re not only calling it an “update”, but they’re planning on shooting the musical in actual London locations.
• F. Gary Gray has landed complete rights to the Marvin Gaye catalog, giving his Gaye biopic a theoretical leg-up on another Gaye biopic, one slated to star Jesse L. Martin, which Variety says will only “focus on the singer’s declining years, because the filmmakers have rights to use songs only from his post-Motown career.” Also, that film though “reportedly skedded to start last month in Europe, has not begun production.”

Wow, I’m tired of talking about Sex and the City. How about you? I’m happy that millions of women found something on a movie screen that appealed to them, even if it’s not something that appeals to me, and I feel like that should be the end of the story. It won’t be, but personally I just want to put the period on this sentence and move on to the next manufactured hysteria. But first, two final thoughts:

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• Sex and the City made almost $56 million over the weekend––almost twice what tracking would have indicated as late as Friday morning. Pamela McClintock says the debut “mystified Hollywood and shattered the decades-old thinking that females — particularly older ones –can’t fuel the sort of big opening often enjoyed by a male-driven event pic or family movie.” I’m mystified that Hollywood––or anyone––could believe that they could spend that much money promoting that beloved a brand and not see results.
• Transformers won the big award of the night at last night’s Attempt to Remind Children Who Mike Myers Is Three Weeks Before The Release of His New Movie MTV Movie Awards.
• Bryce Dallas Howard is in talks to replace Charlotte Gainsbourg in that new Terminator movie. Yes, Charlotte Gainsbourg was apparently going to play John Connor’s wife in that new Terminator movie. Good thing the daughters of men who were famous in the 70s are interchangable!

• Cannes: complete coverage, plus Karina’s 5 favorites.
• Sex and the City: Saving boyfriends, 5 Easy Ways To Dismiss It, is it Why They Hate Us
• Also possibly about sex: War, Inc’s big opening weekend.
• On FilmCouch: Bigger, Stronger, Faster (reviewed here), and gossip from Cannes.
• Sydney Pollack died.
• The Worst Film Ever Made is being remade.
• Manhattan already has been…with Muppets.
• Jean Claude Van Damme: unlikely target of respect.
• Is Tyson accurate?
• Mommie Dearest author tries to protect her lock on the market.
• John Woo returns to China.
• An accidental visit to the set of Brooklyn’s Finest.
• Italian Spider-man
• The Wackness on public access.
• Bill Murray’s divorce ripped from unproduced Lost in Translation 2 script
• 5 favorite graduates.
• Jordan Gray won our Presidential Zombie Contest.
• Fred Astaire brought sexy back 70 years before “SexyBack.”
• Brad Pitt had a funny hairstyle 17 years before Burn After Reading.
• A new movie about The Doors?
• Sharon Stone made China angry.

• Department of Bad Ideas In The Name of Box Office Equivalency, Part 1: Apparently inspired by the success of Indiana Jones and It Really Didn’t Make THAT Much Money, Paramount is hiring Brett Ratner to direct Eddie Murphy in a fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie. It was Murphy’s idea, and there’s currently no script.
• Department of Bad Ideas In The Name of Box Office Equivalency, Part 2: Apparently emboldened by the success of Transformers, Michael Bay is working on another film based on a toy: Ouija. Yes, that board with the alphabet on it that allows slumber partying fifth graders to talk to the dead.
• Department of Things We Can’t Complain About: In honor of their 85th anniversary, Warner Brothers is dipping into their catalog of 6,800 films to push forth a ton of new DVDs and reissues, including “sets of superhero films, musicals and Westerns, including three editions of the MGM’s How the West Was Won, all slotted for third-quarter release, followed in the fourth quarter by horror and holiday collections, including an ultimate collector’s edition of A Christmas Story.”

According to indieWIRE, the John Cusack satire War, Inc made an impressive $45,714 on two screens in its opening weekend. Not exactly Iron Man numbers, but a much higher per-screen average than any other film in limited release. For the sake of perspective: Indiana Jones and I’m Vaguely Certain Shia La Beouf’s IMDb Profile Exaggerates His Height made less than a thousand dollars more per screen in its by all accounts sufficiently massive opening weekend; Cusack’s last film, the also war-themed Grace is Gone, made just $50,899 in its entire theatrical run.

So this a victory for indie film, right? Yay! Except, of course, that the movie’s abysmally bad.

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• Not content to let IFC walk off the Croisette as the big buying ballers of Cannes 2008, Sony Pictures Classics set a number of deals in the last days of the fest, including distribution pacts for the Israeli animated doc Waltz With Bashir, Lorna’s Silence by the Dardenne brothers, and James Toback’s Tyson.
• Meanwhile, the people at Magnolia have all but resigned themselves to distributing What Just Happened?, the Barry Levinson Cannes closer which they produced through 2929 Entertainment, but have been attempting to unload on another distributor since Sundance.
• Ewan McGregor will play Gore Vidal’s dad/Amelia Earhart’s lover in Amelia, a biopic set to star Hillary Swank as the famous missing aviatrix.
• Blah blah blah Indiana Jones, blah blah blah $311 million worldwide.

It may seem like a waste of space to beat this dead horse too heavily, but since we did devote time to analyzing why the bombing of Speed Racer is likely to have a detrimental effect on the future of the blockbuster, it’s relevant. Turns out, the film made even less money than Warner Brothers estimated––about 8% less, dropping its 3-day gross from $20.2 million to $18.6 million, and dropping the film from second place for the weekend, behind the unbeatable Iron Man, to third behind the flash-in-the-pan What Happened in Vegas.

What’s to account for the discrepancy? Apparently, when WB released their numbers on Sunday morning, they were estimating Sunday’s final take based on a typical weekend’s metrics, without accounting for the fact that this past Sunday was Mothers Day––ie: the single day of the year when parents are least likely to pander to their kids’ whines about going to see a hyper-active live-action cartoon. The other studios called bullshit, and by late Monday the real numbers came to light.

The real question is: why didn’t Warners foresee that Mothers Day was going to be a black hole for a film that apparently only appeals to eight year olds and contrarian aesthetes?

So much for Peter Bart’s pet dead horse about the untraversable gap between ticket buyers and film reviewers––Iron Man, so far the year’s best reviewed film, is also thus far 2008’s fastest moneymaker. The critic/audience sync continued this past weekend with Speed Racer. It takes a rare film to unite critics with as disparate a sensibility as Anthony Lane and Armond White in common vitriol; it’s almost unthinkable that the same critically-despised film would fail to appeal to the masses.

“Speed Racer kills cinema,” went White’s fuming, unusable pullquote. But does it? It would be wishful thinking to assume that the average ticket buyer actually cares about “cinema”, never mind the death thereof, but it seems clear to me that the audience’s failure to care about this particular movie could have lasting repercussions for those of us who do take cinema seriously. After jump, you’ll find five reasons why, love the movie or hate it, this bombing could potentially be Bad For Movies on the whole––and one reason why it might be kind of good. As usual, feel free to tell me why I’m a moron in the comments.

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• It’s barely 9am, and I’ve already read a story that made me choke on a bagel and therefore fear for my life: Audrina Partidge, brunette scenery on The Hills, has become the first member of the reality drama’s cast to land a film acting role. She’ll play “a no-nonsense, beautiful beach babe whose boyfriend caters to her every command” in a sequel to Into the Blue, a Jessica Alba film that flopped at the box office but made gobs of money on DVD.
• Iron Man dropped almost 50% in its second weekend, which was still good enough for $50.5 million at the box office––more than the weekend’s two big openers, Speed Racer and What Happens in Vegas were able to scrounge up combined. We’ll have more on Speed’s crash later today.
• Steven Spielberg will put his long-in-the-works Borat-as-Abbie Hoffman movie on hold temporarily to tackle his long-in-the-works Liam Neeson-as-Abraham Lincoln movie. Personally, I’d like to see the two movies combined.

According to indieWIRE’s specialty box office report, Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely made more money last weekend per-screen than any other film in limited release. The IFC release took in $16,769 in its single engagement at the IFC Center in New York, which is pretty astounding when you consider that a) he hasn’t released a movie in almost ten years, and b) Korine’s last film, julien donkey-boy, made just $85,400 in its entire run. Because today is Lazy Video Link Day, let’s celebrate Harmony’s big-money victory by watching the scene from julien in which Werner Herzog spends some quality time with a bottle of cough syrup. Oh, and we reviewed Mister Lonely and talked to Harmony about obscene Southern rap and his favorite YouTube videos, too.

• Iron Man had a huge weekend, grossing $104.2 in the States from Thursday night through Sunday, and a total of $201 across all international territories. And yet it appears that no one was interested in seeing anything else––overall, this weekend’s box office was down 13% from last year’s, when Spider-Man 3 had the best opening weekend ever with $151.1 million.
• Production starts today on that Terminator sequel starring Christian Bale, and its makers are determined to deliver a box office-friendly PG-13. “The PG-13 has increased in intensity,” says Victor Kubicek, the film’s broker-turned-writer-producer. Imagine him saying that in an Arnold voice, and I think you’ll feel better about the whole situation. I did.
• British production company Hammer Films will team with Spitfire Pictures to remake Let the Right One In, the Swedish vampire film that was all the rage last week at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the World Dramatic Narrative prize.
• Maya Entertainment, a distributor known for targeting Spanish-speaking audiences in the U.S., has purchased Sleep Dealer, Alex Rivera’s sci-fi immigration drama which premiered earlier this year at Sundance.

• Swedish vampire buzz magnet Let The Right One In took the top narrative prize at the Tribeca Film Festival last night. Shane Meadows’ Somers Town walked away with consolation acting prizes for its two young stars, and the extremely narratively confused My Marlon and Brando inexplicably won the Best New Narrative Filmmaker award. More Tribeca wrap-up stuff later today.
• Variety says Iron Man “is looking like an ironclad winner” at the box office (for what it’s worth, the 8pm screening I went to last night was barely half-full), whilst Made of Honor, Patrick Dempsey’s return to headlining big-screen romantic comedies after a 20 year hiatus, hopes to “generate some counterprogramming coin.”
• Comedian/Microsoft pitchman Demetri Martin has been cast in the lead role in Ang Lee’s next film, as the closeted gay man who accidentally invented Woodstock.
• New Line has bought its first pitch since moving in with the corporate parents. Dan Mintner: Badass for Hire, a parody of films like Cobra and Predator, is being positioned as “an R-rated comedy in the spirit of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and Wedding Crashers, the kind of movie that ‘classic’ New Line was good at making and that the new iteration will be making as well.” Diablo Cody svengali Mason Novick will co-produce.

• Baby Mama had a big weekend. The Tina Fey comedy made $18 million dollars, beating Harold and Kumar’s take by about $4 million and easily enough for the top box office slot. Still, the stoner comedy more than made back its production budget in its first weekend, and that’s cause enough for Warner execs to take credit for handling their first post-merger New Line release successfully.
• The Hollywood Reporter says IFC is in “final negotiations” to distribute The Pleasure of Being Robbed, the Josh Safdie feature which has been the subject of much chatter since it was announced as the only American film to screen at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes.THR’s Gregg Goldstein is calling this turn of events ” a final triumph for SXSW producer Matt Dentler,” who selected the film for his final Emerging Visions sidebar before departing for Cinetic.
• Idiocracy is not even mentioned in this Variety story about Mike Judge’s next project, a workplace comedy called Extract which is set to star Jason Bateman. Pay no attention to the political satire which spawned an energy drink even though the film itself was barely released––me want more Office Space!!!