• You can rest easier now: Now that he's no longer planning to run for Senate, Chris Matthews has signed a new four-year contract with MSNBC. [NYT]
• Howard Dean has signed on to be a CNBC contributor. [HP]
• Major media companies are now looking for a bailout. From Google. [AdAge]
• Jay Leno's chat with Obama was his fourth most-watched show ever. [LAT]
• Some perks may be curtailed at Condé Nast. Like the one that allowed Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman to fly to Davos first-class, possibly. [NYP]
• Advance Publications is instituting mandatory 10-day furloughs and a pension freeze at nearly all of its daily papers, says Steve Newhouse. [E&P]
• Time publisher Don Fries is headed out the door. [NYP]
• NBC is very good at spinning the Times, in case you haven't noticed. [CJR]
• Knowing starring Nic Cage was No. 1 at the box office this weekend. [NYDN]

Comic-book geeks can't turn movies into blockbusters, or at least that will be the lesson from Watchmen's spectacularly bad second week. Literally begging nerds to see the movie this weekend didn't work.

After a pretty disappointing opening weekend, the cult comic movie — which was hyped as the next Big Cultural Thing — is struggling to avoid a second-weekend box office collapse. So they've begun to beg.

• The recession hasn't been all that bad as far as Hollywood is concerned: Ticket sales this year are up 17.5% and attendance is up 16%. [NYT]
• Viacom and CBS chieftain Sumner Redstone will have until the end of next year to sell off assets in order to repay his enormous pile of debt. [WSJ]
• Hearst is looking to charge readers for online access to its newspapers. [WSJ]
• Univision has laid off 300 people, or 6 percent of its workforce. [AP]
• Hachette is planning to reorganize its collection of women's titles. [WSJ]
• The recession has forced food mags to focus on cheap dining options. [NYT]
• Sarah Silverman's Comedy Central show hasn't been renewed yet and now the show's executive producers have threatened to quit the network. [THR]
• Madea Goes to Jail was No. 1 at the box office again this weekend. [NYDN]
• Another Bernie Madoff-related book is in the works. [NYP]

Good morning and happy, miserable Monday everyone. (Snow on the East, rain on the West). While you cower inside, away from the elements, ponder over the weekend box office report and wonder... why?

• ABC is scrambling to find advertisers for the Oscars. [AdWeek]
• The New York Times takes a delicate look at Carlos Slim Helú today, the media mogul who also happens to have bailed out the paper last month. [NYT]
• Sam Donaldson is retiring from ABC News next week. [WP]
• Tina Brown's advice to young journalism students: Go to India. [HuffPo]
• BlackBook is cutting staff and reducing its frequency to stay afloat. [P6]
• Tim and Nina Zagat are launching a Zagat guide for doctors. [NYT]
• Friday the 13th was No. 1 at the box office this weekend. [THR]
• Alfred A. Knopf Jr. died over the weekend at the age of 90. [NYT]
• Project Runway may return to the air later this year. [WWD]

• The broadcast of Super Bowl XLIII generated solid results for NBC, even though ratings were down 6% from last year. [THR]
• Super Bowl commercial hits and misses. [AdAge, NYT, AdWeek, AdAge]
• NBC reports its Super Bowl spots generated $206 million. [B&C]
• A last-minute deal will allow David Pecker to keep AMI out of bankruptcy and he'll get to keep his job. But he'll now have a new board to deal with. [NYP]
• Michael Boodro is out as editor of Martha Stewart Living. [NYP]
• Is Vibe in trouble? [Gawker]
• David Carr on the problems plaguing Condé Nast. [NYT]
• Fox's Taken was No. 1 at the box office this weekend. [THR]

• Scribner won the non-race to publish Laura Bush's memoir. [AP]
• The Times is now selling ads on the front page of the paper. [NYT]
• Movie ticket sales totaled $9.6 bil. in 2008, down 1 percent from '07. [NYT]
• Is HuffPo worth $200 million? Not so much, says Simon Dumenco. [AdAge]
• Publishing companies are cutting perks, in case you haven't heard. [NYT]
• Howard Kurtz profiles Liz Claman, who left CNBC for Fox. [WaPo]
• Michael Phelps will now be pitching Mazdas in China. [Bloomberg]
• Marley & Me was No. 1 at the box office for a second week. [THR]

The early word on Kirk Cameron's Fireproof hinted that the religious-themed drama would pack a wallop at the specialty box office in late 2008. But $33 million? Holy Christ, indeed.

The Monday Morning Box Office looks basically the same as it did on Friday, with Marley and Me shocking everyone with a $51 million holiday frame. But what does its surprising success really mean?

Among the year-end movie surveys bombing the landscape, few offer as rewarding a reality check as the one recapping 2008 as the Year of the Sucker.

• New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick has confirmed he's writing a book about "Barack Obama, race and politics in America." [Politico]
• David Shuster is the new host of MSNBC's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. [NYT]
• Vogue was the most profitable magazine at Condé Nast this year. [P6]
• Crain Communications (AdAge, Crain's New York) is laying off 60. [NYP]
• The list of layoff victims at CNN grows longer: Jamie McIntyre, Kelli Arena, Linda Stouffer and Rusty Dornin are all on the way out. [TVN]
• The Day the Earth Stood Still was No. 1 at the weekend box office. [NYT]

We hate to beat a dead kangaroo here, but that Australia is showing signs of becoming an epic flop. It's not even doing well in Australia! The country where it was filmed and takes place and was, we suspect, named after! Variety reports that the film has basically done good but not great business since it opened Down Under. Was it overhyped? Variety seems to think so:

Fears that the R-word would keep audiences from the movies this weekend were unfounded, as the name "Reese Witherspoon" still proved an impressive multiplex draw. Have another helping of turkey-chip pancakes topped with cranberry syrup and a pat of yam, as we grind down to the last of the leftovers and run down the box office numbers:

♦ Michael Wolff's biography of Rupert Murdoch goes on sale tomorrow, as you probably know thanks to the torrent of coverage over the past couple of days. Among the juiciest bits: Murdoch despises Bill O'Reilly, his wife Wendi Deng occasionally reads his email, and he's fond of sleeping pills. [NYT, Gawker, Politico, NYO, Portfolio]
♦ The third quarter of 2008 was a punishing one for newspapers. Ad revenue plunged 18.11 percent, the steepest decline in four decades. [E&P]
♦ Tina Brown's pick for host of Meet the Press: Rachel Maddow. [TDB]
♦ Four Christmases was No. 1 at the box office over the weekend, racking up an estimated $31.7 million in ticket sales. [THR]

Twilight made a bamillion dollars this weekend! $70.6 million, to be exact. And while we tried to explain the whole phenomenon last week, the figures and demographics for this teen-falls-in-love-with-vampire horromance tell us all we need to know. Though the whole craze is mostly attributed to teens, a large swath of the film's audience was depressingly over 25, and the younger folks that did show up to ogle the specatcle found the whole thing, well, pretty silly. The Hollywood Reporter tells us what we've sort of already heard: that kids were laughing—laughing! at these precious words: "and so the lion fell in love with the lamb"! that is beautiful Britishy foggy dells and swoopy moors poetry! Lord Byron Shelley Austen! my crotch is sobbing!—while the film flickered on the screen. So leave it to Variety's reported 45% over-25 audience to be the serious ones. They probably sat there all chaste and serious and adulty, whispering small benedictions to remind themselves that it's a good thing to have said "no" to Barry and that someone else will propose—he smelled like onions!—and that the living situation is just temporary and it's not that weird to have a litter box in your bedroom. Then the kids laughed and they got angry and fist shaky that, though it had looked touch-and-go there for a second, the irony which had plagued their lives for so many years was, in fact, not dead at all.

♦ Barack Obama's first post-election interview with 60 Minutes (an excerpt is on your left) earned the show its biggest audience in nine years. [THR]
♦ Dan Rather has spent $2 million battling CBS thus far, but it looks like his time and money may finally be paying off. [NYT]
♦ MTV's TRL came to an end yesterday, in case you haven't heard the terribly tragic news. [NYT]
♦ Rupert Murdoch's New York Post appears to have warmed to Barack Obama. "So has Mr. Murdoch gone soft on liberals—or perhaps just reacted pragmatically to Mr. Obama's sizable victory?" [NYT]
♦ The new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, was No. 1 at the box office this weekend. The flick generated $70.4 in its first three days. [Reuters]

♦ John McCain's appearance on Saturday Night Live didn't generate Sarah Palin-like ratings, but it was still an impressive showing nonetheless. [THR]
♦ No word yet on who will take over NBC's Meet the Press. Chuck Todd, David Gregory, Gwen Ifill, and even Katie Couric all remain possibilities. [NYT]
♦ CBS is on a primetime ratings roll, although Sumner Redstone is still screwed, apparently. [NYT, NYT]
♦ Another profile of Rachel Maddow, just in case the 237 other pieces on MSNBC's rising star in recent weeks have yet to whet your appetite. [NYM]
♦ In case you missed it, the clip of Sarah Palin getting punked by a couple of Montreal radio personalities, who explain how they managed to get through to her. [ABC]

Disney's back-ordered fleet of Brinks trucks had better arrive soon: High School Musical 3: Senior Year is tracking for a $38 million opening weekend, with Beverly Hills Chihuahua anticipating another $6 million in its fourth week of release. Those grosses would likely land the all-ages tandem together in the Top 5 at the box office — the first time two non-Pixar Disney titles have shared that space since 1994. Useless trivia? We think not — and we aren't alone.Nikki Finke has her own interesting read this morning, pointing to the even rarer phenomenon of a cable movie franchise so lucratively crossing over to the multiplex. Series are one thing, and rarely a lock themselves (Disney only had a Hannah Montana blockbuster at the ready because it brought cameras on tour with Miley Cyrus), but we'll buy lunch at the Grill for the first reader who can name a made-for-TV feature that spawned a theatrical No. 1. (Opposite another cash cow like Saw 5, no less.) And then s/he can buy us a life. We'll have more fearless predictions tomorrow in our Defamer Attractions column, but in the meantime, expect Disney to have greenlighted Camp Rock 3D: Escape of the Jonases for IMAX by the the time you finish reading this sentence.

♦ Not surprisingly, ratings for SNL this past weekend exceeded expectations. Some 10 million people tuned in for Tina Fey's Sarah Palin skit. [WSJ, THR]
♦ Michelle Obama will appear on Jon Stewart on Wednesday. [HuffPo]
♦ Beverly Hills Chihuahua took the top spot at the weekend box office with $29 million. [Mojo]
♦ Joe Hagan takes a long look at the Times-owning Sulzbergers in this week's issue of New York. [NYM]
♦ AdAge has released its list of the 10 best magazines. [AdAge]
♦ Campbell Brown is working out nicely for CNN: Ratings are substantially higher than they were for Paula Zahn and she's beating Keith Olbermann most nights, too. [NYT]
♦ Ratings for Desperate Housewives continue to decline. [TVDecoder]
♦ HBO's Entourage has been renewed for a sixth season. [THR]