Despite nearly a year's worth of hand-wringing in the media about 2005's five-percent-ish downturn at the box office (commonly referred to as The Slump, and accompanied by the sound of air-raid sirens), the business appears healthy enough overall; most studio executives haven't found themselves the victims of a movie-watching paradigm shift that would send them scrambling to sell their Lexus SUV's to meet their monthly coke bills just yet. Today's LAT writes off the supposedly apocalyptic effects on the industry of last year's "blip," but we're still reminded that the hysteria caused by a year of Aeon Fluxes and Stealths still claimed some high-profile victims:

· Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer "quietly" agree to a 5-year film production deal, locking up the producer responsible for half-a-billion dollars' worth of Pirates of the Caribbean sequels long enough to allow Bruck to oversee the eventual installments starring Paul Walker and Bruce Willis in the roles originated by Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp. To celebrate their continuing partnership, Mouse head Robert Iger and Bruckheimer will detonate Snow White's castle at the conclusion of tonight's Disneyland fireworks, then dance around any broken character bodies injured in the display. [Variety]
· Sundance announces this year's festival slate, with officials promising "a return to our roots" demonstrated by a commitment to movies that might seem less marketable to Hollywood types than years past. Hollywood types express their gratitude to the Sundance staff for further reducing any guilt they might feel about flying to Utah solely to drink themselves snowblind while fighting over gift bags. [THR]
· Paramount signs up Jim Carrey to star in a Tim Burton-directed action-adventure film based on Robert "Believe It or Not" Ripley's life, but the actor will "squeeze in" a thriller, a Ben Stiller comedy, and a brief nervous breakdown hiatus before reporting for Ripley duty next October. [Variety]
· The Squid and the Whale leads the Independent Spirit award nominations with six, including ones for best feature, best male lead, and best female lead. [THR]
· Faded NBC Uni golden boy Jeff Zucker lures Miramax survivor Meryl Poster to his lair with a producing deal for both television shows and feature films. Poster's deal also gives Zucker the contractual right to furtively assassinate her in the press should his own job ever seem in danger. [Variety]

· Owen "The Butterscotch Stallion" Wilson shakes his glorious mane and gallops proudly away from Paramount's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, possibly due to the studio's inability to find a female co-star meeting the Stallion's exacting standards. In a tragic downgrade, Zach Braff is now considered the frontrunner to take Wilson's place. [THR]
· Fox orders a pilot of the Jerry "All Your TV Are Belong To Me" Bruckheimer celebrity-lawyer procedural American Crime. Bored of merely recycling concepts, Bruckheimer mixes things up by reusing titles, as American Crime was the original name of CBS's Close to Home. [Variety]
· Jennifer Garner's Vandalia Films sets up erotic thriller Sabbatical at Touchstone as a starring vehicle for the actress, who bravely refuses to believe that marrying Ben Affleck has effectively ended her career. [THR]
· Touchstone TV rewards Grey's Anatomy showrunner Jim Parriott for his breakout, post-Housewives timeslot hit with a three year overall deal. [Variety]
· NBC ponders moving My Name is Earl to highly competitive (and lucrative) Thursday night, but Fox might be mulling a shift of juggernaut American Idol to that night as well, likely resulting in untold Must See TV ratings carnage. [THR]

· In a drastic corporate realignment, Warner Bros. becomes the first studio to combine home entertainment, Internet, wireless, games and other other digital operations into one group. What this means for you is precisely nothing. But for Java developers making downloadable Harry Potter Quidditch cell phone games, the world will never again be the same. [Variety]
· Paramount is in final negotiations with Layer Cake director Matthew Vaughn to direct and produce a screen version of Neil Gaiman s Stardust, about a young man who promises his beloved that he'll retrieve a fallen star by venturing into the magical realm, where he has to contend with witches, goblins, gnomes, talking animals and evil trees. One Ring nerds everywhere go on a cloak dry-cleaning frenzy. [Variety]
· A record 58 countries have submitted films to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Oscar consideration, including previously unrepresented Iraq, Costa Rica and Fiji. Sean Penn begins composing his annual sourpuss pronouncement early this year to make sure he gets the tricky Arabic verb tenses right. [THR]
· CBS wins the ratings week, with ABC a strong second. And King Midas, Crap Version NBC was down 11% vs. the same week a year ago, with its Thursday lineup off 27%. Have you guys ever thought about another line of work? I mean, seriously. I hear biotech is heating up! [Variety]
· Undeterred that E-Ring is doing less that spectacular Nielsen numbers, NBC makes a pilot-commitment to another Jerry Bruckheimer-produced series: the medical thriller Invisible, centering on a rogue researcher for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who's tracking a mysterious illness. Andy Dick is rumored favorite to play the virus. [Variety]

· Steven Spielberg makes a deal with gaming juggernaut Electronic Arts to develop three original video game franchises. EA will own the rights to games, and Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment first-look development rights for TV and Film. The first game is already in the works, and will revolve around a hugely successful director's attempts to keep his out-of-control star from terrorizing depressed new mothers and ruining the opening of their summer blockbuster. [Variety]
· True of False: The Hollywood Reporter really, really likes Jodie Foster. Have you ever seen a salad tossed in true-false form? You have now. [THR]
· Steve Carell sets up two projects with Universal, ensuring that he will have steady work well into the next decade. One is from Carell's original pitch, the other, according to one of its writers, "[I]s for Steve to play the most Caucasian man in America, who's sent to juvenile prison for a petty crime he committed as a kid. Suddenly this suburban drip is surrounded by 11-year-old bad-asses." Ooh, watch the uptight cracker get menaced by 11-year-old bad-asses of color! [Variety]
· Jerry Bruckheimer buys the rights to the sports comedy Ballers, assigns his staff to determine a plausible way that pro footballers might explode spectacularly. [THR]
· What's left of Miramax buys the North American rights to The Queen, a film about the royal family after Princess Diana's death, based on a scene from a particularly moving commemorative dinner plate. [Variety]

Blogger The Corsair transcribes a section of an interview from Hollywood Life magazine with Sir Anthony Hopkins, who's developed an innovative system for coping with preparation-destroying on-set rewrites:

In the interest of healthy debate, Defamer is committed to dedicating a small amount of blogspace to the opposing viewpoints of its readers. Late yesterday, a reader wrote in to offer a dissenting voice to counterpoint our continuing coverage of superproducer Jerry Bruckheimer, the man behind such high-grossing entertainments as Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, and roughly 85 percent of CBS's primetime television programming. Say what you will about Bruckheimer, but his movies transcend the language barriers that often interfere with universal enjoyment of the cinematic experience:

Today's LAT finally figures out how überproducer Jerry Bruckheimer, whom after last week's upfronts eclipsed legends Aaron Spelling and Norman Lear by landing ten shows on primetime network schedules, has achieved such a staggering level of TV success in such a short amount of time: He gives amazing notes.

With four series pick-ups for the Fall joining his six series already on the air (which adds up to something like 43 total shows), superproducer Jerry Bruckheimer has made your television-watching eyeballs his bitch. But even after his domination of the primetime airwaves, Bruckheimer's noble mission hasn't changed: