• Celebrity death cult where were you? Soul Men, featuring the final performance from Bernie Mac, underperformed over the weekend, placing only sixth with $5.6 million. I guess you preferred his other final film, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, which achieved the best debut of 2008 for an animated film with $63.5 million. The other big opener was Role Models, which did better than expected with a second-placing $19.3 million. All thanks to Jane Lynch’s bagel dog trick, I’m hoping.
• Meanwhile, Quantum of Solace, which doesn’t open in the States until Friday, has already passed the $100 million mark overseas.
• Despite YouTube video being possibly the worst format in which to watch movies online, MGM is licensing some of its titles (no 007 movies, unfortunately) to the site for full-length streaming.
• Joe Johnston, who has a Best Visual Effects Oscar for work on Raiders of the Lost Ark, has been hired by Marvel to direct First Avenger: Captain America. And I’m probably the only one who’s now hoping the comic book adaptation is reminiscent of the Johnston-directed The Rocketeer.
• Terrible news: the Brokeback Mountain opera is no longer happening.

• Today in Possibly Fake Protests: “An Islamic civil rights and advocacy group” wants Warner Brothers to change the title of Alan Ball’s Towelhead, because they find it offensive. When Towelhead, based on a novel called Towelhead, premiered at Toronto last year, it was called Nothing is Private; they changed it to Towelhead in the hopes of drawing more attention, That was eight months ago, and no one cared. Until now! Two weeks before the movie’s release!
• MGM released a statement denying reports that the studio is for sale. Earlier this month, rumors spread that Kirk Kerkorian had made an offer to buy the studio for the 17th time, and everyone kind of assumes that Paula Wagner’s recent exit from United Artists suggests that that wing of MGM is in trouble.
• Reservoir Dogs, The Bank Job, Gods and Monsters, Girl With a Pearl Earring and Requiem for a Dream are among the Lionsgate titles now available for online download via a deal between the studio and Jaman.com.

• Peter Jackson, Frank Walsh and Philippa Boyens will collaborate with director Guillermo Del Toro on the screenplays for the latter’s two Hobbit movies. The original plan was to hire outside hands to produce a script, but in order to make the first film’s 2011 release date, Del Toro and Jackson apparently concurred that they needed a team of “people intimate with Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth.”
• Eon, the company that produces movies based on James Bond novels, has declined to buy the rights to the latest 007 book, Devil May Care. The book is set in 1967, and Eon is determined to keep this new wave of Bond films as contemporary as possible.
• Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, the team responsible for the script for Michael Bay’s remake of The Birds, have now been hired to write a do-over of Poltergeist.
• Kirk Kerkorian, who has already owned MGM three times and was responsible for extending the film studio brand into Las Vegas, is rumored to have made an offer to buy the company for a fourth time for a low-ball bid of $3 billion.

• What started as a fight over 4 cents has become a debate over $100 million. The AMPTP says their residuals offer would net writers $130 million over three years; the WGA says the studios’ math is wrong, and by their calculations, the deal is worth only $32 million. Yesterday, in response to a WGA counterproposal that would peg online residuals to the number of streams, Variety reports “the studios and nets offered conceptual questions about structure and measurement of streaming usage — in other words, they didn’t reject the proposal out of hand.” The Hollywood Reporter’s optismism over these new developments is barely contained in the headline, “It’s a holiday miracle: Sides ‘actually talk.’”
• Scott Kirsner reports from the just-concluded International Film Festival Summit for Variety. My favorite takeaway is this dry observation: “Sessions on selling sponsorship and working with the media were packed with attendees. Less full was a session led by two independent filmmakers, who advised fest organizers to drop their entry fees, supply free travel and housing and make sure that filmmakers could gain entry to the best parties.”
• Lionsgate vice chairman Michael Burns gave a speech yesterday indicating that the company is interested in maintaining a financial standing that would allow them to acquire a content library, should such an opportunity present itself; this was apparently code for, “We wanna buy MGM, y’all!“

As political polemic and as entertainment, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is mostly unsuccessful, but as a statement of purpose on behalf of its co-star and executive producer, Tom Cruise, it’s mildly fascinating. Through sheer force of star power, Cruise manages to temporarily hijack this lumpy lecture, and turn it into a battle cry against the corporate media that both built and destroyed him.

You probably don’t need to be reminded that Cruise has had a rough couple of years, culminating in the announcement in November 2006 that he and long-time producing partner Paula Wagner had signed a deal to resurrect MGM’s dormant United Artists. Some saw this as a savvy move for both Cruise and MGM: disappointing box office on Mission Impossible: 3 aside, there’s still no one on the planet with Cruise’s international name-and-face recognition, and as he proved with War of the Worlds, which made $65 million in its first weekend just a scant month after the couch jumping incident, the guy can open the right project regardless of what’s going on in his personal life. But skeptics (myself included) wondered if MGM was just throwing Cruise a bone—if they weren’t doing anything with UA anyway, was handing the brand over really a sure sign of confidence?

The guy had—has–something to prove. With his career at the crossroads, the choice of Lions For Lambs as the vehicle to drive him over the hump is not an immediately logical one. It’s worth noting that Cruise didn’t go looking for politically relevant story to tell—Redford signed on to direct the script, and then called Cruise, looking to cast him. And I may get permanently disinvited from Sundance for saying this, but I’m not sure if Redford fully knew what he was getting into.

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