Studio Went Super-Secret to Protect Batman

Latest 'Twilight' entry enjoys 3rd-biggest weekend ever

(NEWSER) - In the third-largest weekend debut ever, The Twilight Saga: New Moon rang up $140.7 million, riding records for a midnight opening and a single day to totals trailing only The Dark Knight and Spider-Man. Audiences were four-fifths female, with the remaining 20% mostly teen boys, USA Today reports. The Blind Side outperformed expectations, doing $34.5 million. Precious fell out of the top five but remained in the top 10, taking in $11 million. The top five: More»

Measuring a film's success in dollars is misleading

(NEWSER) - Not a year seems to go by without a film breaking a box-office records: Dark Knight a contender for biggest all-time earner! Bourne Ultimatum the top August opener! But that’s not because the films actually draw more viewers than the previous record-holders; it's because the figures are in dollars, which are subject to inflation, writes Zachary Pincus-Roth for Slate. More»

Michael Bay robot-romp could be biggest movie of 2009

(NEWSER) - Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen nearly toppled the 5-day opening record by earning $201.2 million since Wednesday, Entertainment Weekly reports. The Dark Knight remains unbeaten at $203.8 million, but Transformers still crushed the weekend competition with a $112 million gross. Filling out the top five were The Proposal ($18.5 million), The Hangover ($17.2 million), Up ($13 million), and My Sister's Keeper ($12 million). More»

(NEWSER) - The new Transformers flick had a stellar start, raking in $60.6 million on opening day to make it the biggest Wednesday debut ever, Variety reports. For all-around opening days, the Michael Bay shoot-em-up lags just behind record-holder Dark Knight, which took in $67.2 million on a Friday last summer. Transformers 2 has a shot at eclipsing the best five-day open ever, a mark of $152.4 million set by Spider-Man 2 in 2004. More»

(NEWSER) - The Oscars are coming up, but that orgy of self-congratulation doesn’t celebrate what really matters in Hollywood: money. Forbes crunched the numbers for 2008 and selected the winners of a different award: the Rainmaker.

• Best Actor: Robert Downey Jr. returned $52.60 to Paramount for every dollar it spent to put him in Iron Man. The sky-high profit was enabled by Downey's then-low asking price, an aftereffect of his years of trouble with drugs and the law.