Sunday, February 28, 2010 at 10:07PM 
Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island blocked newcomers Cop Out and The Crazies from the top spot at the box office this past weekend. Shutter Island rode a wave of good word of mouth, dropping a respectable 46% in the face of bad weather on the Eastern portion of the continent to a tally of $22.2 million in its second weekend. The film has earned $75 million to date.
Monday, February 22, 2010 at 10:29PM Wal-Mart hit the adult video industry hard today with their purchase of Vudu Inc. Vudu builds a set-top box for watching movies over the Internet, and also licenses their technology to a variety of other providers (Samsung, Toshiba, LG and Sharp, to name a few) for inclusion in Blu-ray players and other Internet-enabled devices.
One of the advantages Vudu has over their competitors in the video download market (competitors like Netflix, Amazon and Apple) is that they struck a deal with the Adult Video Network (AVN), who offer adult content from providers like Vivid, Hustler and Wicked Pictures. Wal-Mart is obviously not going to be interested in tarnishing their conservative, family-friendly image by getting into bed (so to speak) with pornographers.
Sunday, February 21, 2010 at 11:15PM 
As expected, Martin Scorsese's new film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Shutter Island, bested its box office competition this weekend, drawing an estimated $40.2 million. This represents a best-ever debut for both Scorsese and DiCaprio, and is a fantastic debut for an R-rated genre flick.
Last week's big opener, Valentine's Day, no longer boosted by the natural publicity its namesake holiday generated, plummeted from the top spot. It dropped 69%, coming in at $17.1 million for a cumulative total of $87.4 million so far.
In third place was James Cameron's Avatar, with $16.1 million. It's 31.8% drop was it's biggest week-over-week to date. With a whopping $687 million in domestic grosses to date, Avatar is undoubtedly reaching the end of its salad days, as it'll lose most of its 3-D screens to Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in the coming weeks.
Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief had its strong debut weekend cut in half, bringing in $15.3 million for $58.7 million so far. With another $68 million in international grosses, it should have no problem earning back its $95 million production budget. It's no Harry Potter, but a strong performance on DVD/Blu-ray could help to make other books in the series a reality.
Finally, rounding out the top five is last week's second place opener, and another film that suffered a massive drop week-over-week, The Wolfman. The action/horror flick dropped 69% to $9.8 million in its second weekend. With an estimated $50 million domestically, and an anemic $46 million internationally (this type of picture usually does much better overseas), it will likely lose money for Universal Studios.
Avatar, all-time grosses, blockbuster, box office in Movies, News Thursday, February 18, 2010 at 8:10PM Roger Ebert in Movies, News Wednesday, February 17, 2010 at 4:48PM A fantastic article on Roger Ebert over at Esquire today. He's one of the best-known and most respected movie critics on the planet, and the article does a great job of chronicling the struggles he's had over recent years.
His outlook on life is reason enough to take an inventory of your own views.
Esquire, Roger Ebert in Movies, News