· In her first film since her split with Raffaello Follieri, Anne Hathaway will topline The Opposite of Love as an attorney whose life collapses when she rejects her boyfriend's marriage interests. That kind of thing will happen when you say "No" to a Vatican wedding. [Variety] · Memo to Will Smith and Warner Bros. re your planned I Am Legend prequel: Save $149,999,996 and rent the original. It has flashbacks and everything! [Variety] After the jump: Spielberg contemplates sci-fi, Travolta visits Paris, and at last! Fag hags get a show of their own!· Boldly empowered by his newfound independence from Paramount, Steven Spielberg's next film may finally tackle his risky, long-unexplored interest in child/alien relationships. [THR] · Parlez vous Flopz™? John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers are off to France as a spy and embassy worker in the thriller From Paris With Love. [Variety] · In our favorite Media Irony of the Day, masthead vagabond Tina Brown's HBO deal will officially launch with I Am Charlotte Simmons, a series adapted from Tom Wolfe's novel. [Gawker] · Are you a "girl who likes boys who likes boys?" If so, you might be Bravo's next big star! [La Daily Musto]

The soul-deadening imposition of commercial brands on your moviegoing experience got even more shameless this morning when the oft-overlooked ring of Hell know as "brandcameo" unveiled the winners of its fourth annual Product Placement Awards. You could probably guess at least most of the heavyweight competitors — your Apples, your Fords, your Manolos — from a glance at the last year's worth of releases, but that doesn't make the year's findings any less remarkable in context: The surveyors counted an average of 22.1 brands in each of the 20 films this year to have a No. 1 weekend at the box office. That number is down from 2007, when an average of nearly 25 brands were counted among the year's 32 top releases. The dollars aren't disclosed, but follow the jump for a depressing if fascinating array of blockbusters for sale, the brands that bought them and the ultimate recognition of their unholy unions:

[Photo Credit: Splash Pics]

· The Return of Late Night (*Doc Severinson trumpet flourish*) brings a veritable who-cares of stars to their chilled couches. Leno has Jamie Lynn Spears'-pregnancy-endorsing candidate Mike Huckabee, and Letterman has Donald Trump, on hand to find out which of his Celebrity Apprentice candidates float. [THR]
· More on the Worldwide Pants/WGA deal: Writers got what the Guild is demanding for internet across the board: "3% based on the applicable minimum payment per 100,000 hits." [THR]
· Netscape Navigator, who for some of us was our first portal into the many splendors of the bold new fetish-catering technology of the World Wide Web, is to be buried beneath a heavy pillow in its sleep by corporate parent AOL. [THR]
· Chinese actor and director Sun Daolin died at age 86, his illustrious cinematic legacy in many ways paving the way for Chris Tucker shouting about the words coming out of his mouth at a nonplussed Jackie Chan. [Variety]
· Overseas audiences still can't get enough of I Am Legend, which foreign film snoots are calling the greatest exploration of the existentialist dilemma since 1948's La Terra trema. [Variety]

With Father Time currently in lockdown after being picked up over the weekend for a parole-violating DUI, and the tragic discovery of the New Year's baby in a dumpster behind Bar Lubitsch (besides a crushed top hat and filthy sash, doing just fine), it seems as if the countdown to 2008 comes under less than ideal circumstances. Still, you can't stop the march of progress, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the weekend box office numbers:

On these final few hours before the sugarplum-gorging orgy that begins at dawn, we dutifully tabulate for you, like a trembling Bob Cratchit scratching figures with a quill pen into the margins of the Scrooge & Marley ledger, the weekend's box office numbers:
1. National Treasure: Book of Secrets - $45.5 million
Frankly, we don't know what took infallible superproducer Jerry Bruckheimer and supermuse Nicolas Cage this long to bring us another Treasure chapter: With Secrets conquering this weekend's box office (and bringing in $10 mil more than the original), the American-history-corrupting adventure serial has now graduated to official franchise&trade status. We're eagerly anticipating all future installments, including National Treasure: Three Dollar Bill, in which Cage and his ragtag band of bookish fortune-hunters discover that the Lincoln Memorial's head spins to the left when a Sacagawea and Susan B. Anthony dollar are placed in its orbital sockets, revealing a secret tunnel to J. Edgar Hoover's fabled lingerie closet.

We knew that Hollywood wouldn't allow itself to limp out of 2007 on the back of a crippled, armored polar bear—celebrate the studios' late-year resurrection with a quick perusal of the weekend's box office numbers: