• Kung Fu Panda made $60 million this weekend, 150% of the gross of the weekend’s number two film, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. Sex and the City dropped 63% to fourth place; power blogger Peter Bart says its because the women of America spent the weekend atoning for the previous ten days of cosmo-steeped empowerment fantasies by bowing to the demands of their boyfriends and children. Which may not bode well for…
• Chickflicks, a new indie production company headed by Sara Risher and Stephanie Austin, which will produce two or three films per year with women in mind. Risher, hooking the project to the success of Sex and the City, said “the underserved market for intelligent, emotional films with relatable female characters has spoken emphatically.” For one week, at least.
• Meanwhile, Mongol, one of the very last films to come out under the Picturehouse banner, easily won the specialty race this weekend, with a per screen average of $26,627. Also: Bob Berney is apparently planning on going into business with unidentified pedestrians.

I’ve been in a really ominous mood all day. I thought it was just because the sky is grey and I’ve been been listening to this Belong EP, which basically sounds like a prolonged death rattle, but now that I’m reporting the second major story about people losing their jobs in the past couple of hours, I’m starting to feel like it’s not just me. The whole internet feels like the last scene of Madam Butterfly today––death now fills the air.

Anyway: the news. Warner Brothers has shut down its two remaining, dueling indie arms, Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse. Warner’s COO Alan Horn released a statement basically saying that the shell of New Line will handle all low budget fare going forward, and claimed to be “confident that the spirit of independent filmmaking and the opportunity to find and give a voice to new talent will continue to have a presence at Warner Bros.”

So. What about acquisitions? Will Warners be sending one of the ten New Line employees left standing to Cannes next week, or will they just cede that game to the other indie arms and focus on the cheap genre fare that the new New Line is allegedly committed to churning out? What about the WIP and Picturehouse movies already in the can and on the shelf––like Picturehouse’s remake of The Women, or WIP’s anti-climax waiting to happen, Towelhead? Your guesses are as good as mine. I’m just hung up on the fact that Funny Games was the last WIP release. Funny Games killed a studio!

• 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.