· 3,000 attend the Spider-Man 3 Tribeca Film Festival premiere in Astoria, Queens, uncharitably described as "roughly the east coast equivalent of Van Nuys." We hope nobody from Var is planning any trips to that borough in the near future, as we fear for their safety after that slight. [Variety]
· The U.S. Trade Representative puts China and Russia on notice, naming the two nations as the world-leaders in copyright theft, and threatening them with visits from DVD-sniffing wonderdogs Lucky and Flo should they not demonstrate a commitment to stopping movie piracy. [THR]
· "Magic" screen test chemistry lands 26-year-old Australian unknown Luke Ford a key role in the next Mummy movie, a casting move that may allow Universal to jettison Brendan Fraser after this installment and continue the franchise with cheaper talent. [Variety]
· Steven Spielberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Fox's Peter Chernin, Disney's Bob Iger, and dozens of others pull honorary pallbearer duty at Jack Valenti's Washington, DC funeral. [THR]
· Peter Jackson is shopping around his spec adaptation of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones; predictably left out of the bidding war fun: New Line, whom Jackson is suing for untold millions in Lord of the Rings royalties he claims to be owed. [Variety]
· In a move meant to recognize the breadth and quality of the original programming that plays above its famous scrolling grid of television listings, the TV Guide Channel boldly rebrands as TV Guide Network. [THR]

· A stunning reform movement sweeps the Academy of TV Arts & Sciences! Two new Emmy rules have been introduced: The "Lost" Rule, in which potential nominees must provide an up to 250 word essay describing what the hell their show is about to assist lazy Academy staffers in the nomination process, and The Ellen Burstyn Rule, requiring that actors must have appeared in at least 5 percent of a given program to be eligible for awards immortality. [Variety]
· Steven Spielberg is shacking up with Showtime, developing the comedy The United States of Tara, concerning the Weeds-style seriocomic adventures of a suburban housewife afflicted with multiple personality disorder. The leading role is described as "a potential tour de force" for the lucky actress ultimately selected for play the one-woman ensemble. [Variety]
· New Line announces it will remake Escape from New York with star Gerard Butler, an actor so red-hot off 300's huge opening weekend that he has now earned the chance to pick up Kurt Russell's sloppy seconds. [THR]
· Var's Peter Bart weighs in on the Great Critics Vs. Crap-Craving Moviegoers War of Early 2007, suggesting the reviewers are so weary after their losing battles with 300, Norbit, Wild Hogs, and Ghost Rider that they might need to take a vacation until September, when more artiscally minded product finally surfaces. [Variety]

Fresh off his recent screen triumph in which he played a cartoonist in hot pursuit of an elusive serial killer who may or may not have also provided the voice of Roger Rabbit, Jake Gyllenhaal may next may thrill his legions of Brokeback-dialogue-spouting admirers by slipping into some red tights and gold lamé to play second-tier-Superman Captain Marvel:

The LAT's Patrick Goldstein profiles cantankerous New Line co-chairman/co-CEO Bob Shaye, an executive utterly unafraid to call an unimpressed reviewer "schmucky," alienate a filmmaker who's made his studio a billion dollars, or to make a controversial choice to have Rainn Wilson's tantalizingly revealed hindquarters digitally obscured so as not to pander to an audience's basest, crack-craving tastes, a principled decision that could cost his upcoming film, The Last Mimzy, untold millions in ticket sales. In talking to the Times, Shaye also demonstrates a willingness to publicly call out a certain hacky director of a hit franchise who might be taking advantage of the fact that his movie is New Line's best chance at making some money this summer:

A tipster forwarded us one of the latest offerings from New Line's Google News Alert-inspired marketing effort, designed to instill in its mass e-mail recipients a reflexive, bowel-loosening dread of the mysteriously recurring number soon bedeviling a paranoid Jim Carrey at a multiplex near you, one which is sure to win the studio's team a Best Use of a Frozen Dead Baby In An Online Campaign at next year's Flackies.

· Sundance hands out its awards, with Padre Nuestro winning the dramatic competition's grand jury prize, the John Cusack-starring Grace is Gone winning the drama audience award, and Brazilian corruption film Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) taking the documentary jury prize. [Variety]
· Will Arnett joins Will Ferrell's ABA basketball comedy Semi-Pro as a "hard-drinking sports commentator," probably reducing the chances that audiences will get to see him in knee-high tube socks and nut-hugging shorts, but increasing the chances he will appear in a mustard-colored sportsjacket while openly swigging from a whiskey bottle at courtside. [THR]
· CBS is forced to cancel Armed and Famous after American Idol's Nielsen death ray disintegrates its audience, while ABC moves fledgling Knights of Prosperity out of Idol's competition-annihilating path. [Variety]
· Night at the Museum holds off Pursuit of Happyness to continue its five-week reign atop the international box office. [THR]
· Hoping to lock up the coveted Ron Silver endorsement, Rudolph Giuliani plans to visit L.A. to raise money for his exploratory committee for a 2008 presidential run. [Variety]

· Want more Gail Berman stories? Of course you do. [Variety, THR]
· Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson politely responds to New Line co-chairman Bob Shaye's comments to Sci Fi Wire that Jackson (who is suing NL over LOTR money he says he says he's owed) will make The Hobbit or any other movie with his studio (and we paraphrase here) over Shaye's rotting, festering dead body. [Variety]
· Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton and Tilda Swinton are in negotiations to star in Charlie Kaufman's directing debut, Synecdoche, New York, a project whose script was memorably made sweet love to by the LAT back in September. [THR]
· Meryl Streep will star in the film adaptation of the ABBA musical Mamma Mia! [Variety]
· The FBI hosted a screenwriting workshop in Westwood to educate writers in the hopes that their counterterrorism efforts will be more accurately portrayed in future film and television productions. For example, scribes learned that Kiefer Sutherland's beheading of a suspect on 24 does not fall within the guidelines of the government's best vigilante justice practices. [THR]

· Var's Peter Bart calls out fellow Academy voter Oprah Winfrey for her rule-bending tendency to loudly campaign for her Oscar favorites. An AMPAS spokesman answers Bart's charges about their acceptance of Winfrey's cheerleading by saying, "Shhhh! She's fucking crazy, she'll have us all killed. Let her slobber all over Jennifer Hudson if it makes her happy." [Variety]
· There's something for everyone at this weekend's box office! As long as you want to see Ben Stiller being chased around by animated dinosaur bones, Sylvester Stallone getting beaten up by a guy young enough to be his grandson, or [spoiler alert] Matt Damon getting urinated on while mud-wrestling with naked men. [THR]
Foreign moviegoers declare war on Christmas, staying away from The Nativity Story in the proverbial droves. [Variety]
· Subtitles: Not just for art-house movie nerds anymore. [THR]
Germans moviegoers are expected to ignore Flags of Our Fathers, as they're getting pretty tired of Hollywood reminding them that they lost World War II. [Variety]

In case the raw number of $66.2 million that Casino Royale took in at the international box office isn't enough to impress you, that amount was more than double the combined totals of its four closest competitors. We're cowed by the drawing power of Blonde Bond, at least when he's not having his spy-junk stomped by dancing penguins. [Variety]
Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith set up two TV comedy projects, one at The CW about single moms "making lunch and making love" within the same apartment complex, and one at ABC about what happens when a pair of mothers-in-law move in with "an upper-class black man from a conservative family and his Jewish wife from a liberal lower-middle-class family" who are trying to raise twins (what, no talking dog?), a project apparently created when an overly ambitious writer set her Random Sitcom Premise Generator to its highest wackiness setting. [THR]
· New Line's The Nativity Story premiered Sunday at the Vatican without the Pope in attendance, with rumors that he opted out of the event because the movie's unwed, pregnant, teenage star did not conceive through appropriately immaculate means. [Variety]
Carson Daly is supplementing his TV hosting duties with a producing career in online content, hoping to realize his longtime dream of becoming the "Ryan Seacrest of the Internet." [THR]
Fox, CBS, and NBC continue to fight FCC over new indecency regulations, while ABC and The CW haven't yet been fined enough to join the fray. [Variety]

Producer New Line, distributor MGM, and Peter Jackson are locked in an epic battle over who has control over The Hobbit after Jackson declares that he's not willing to talk about directing the film until New Line coughs up the Lord of the Rings profits they've allegedly screwed him out of, while New Line counter-threatens to press on without him, a move that would almost certainly result in global fanboy riots. [Variety]
At the International Emmys, "very concerned" parent Steven Spielberg warns that semen-splattered corpses on CSI and people being sliced in half on Heroes might not necessarily be the best things for children to watch. [THR]
Heroes puts up the best 18-49 demo ratings that NBC's seen all season, throwing a spotlight on the momentum-stopping performance of Studio 60's Very Special Episode on the evils of product placement. [Variety]
· Nearly three years later, the FCC and CBS are still fighting over Janet Jackson's nipple. Thanks a lot, Timberlake. [THR]
Anne Hathaway is "close" to signing on to play Agent 99 to Steve Carrell's Maxwell Smart in Get Smart adaptation for Warner Bros. [Variety]

New Line is the latest studio to prove that any pitch in the form of "Will Ferrell is a(n) [occupation for which Will Ferrell seems hilariously ill-suited] is an instant greenlight, signing up the actor for Semi-Pro, in which Ferrell will put on the ball-huggingest pair of shorts ever conceived by a wardrobe department while portraying "Jackie Moon, the flamboyant owner-player-coach of the fictional Flint, Mich., Tropics in the final year of the American Basketball Assn." Woody Harrelson will co-star, though it's not clear if he's playing the complimentarily dim-witted sidekick or Ferrell's cocky rival. [Variety]
Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz and Arrested Development writer Richard Day are adapting the BBC series The Thick of It for American television, apparently hoping to find some way to translate the wholly foreign concept of "bureaucratic ineptitude" in British governance to the flawless law-making processes of Congress. [THR]
The Weinstein Co. claims that NBC and The CW are refusing to air commercials for the Dixie Chicks documentary Shut Up and Sing because they criticize the president, a burgeoning censorship controversy that should cripple Harvey Weinstein's efforts to raise public awareness of their free-speech-centered film. [Variety]
ABC orders four more scripts from Help Me Help You, The Nine, and Men in Trees, while NBC orders three more from Studio 60; we'll leave it to you to figure out which series the networks actually want to nurture with a show of faith, and which ones they're hoping will write themselves out of a full-season episode order with further sketch-comedy musings on Nancy Grace's inadequacies as a cable news journalist. [THR]
Hollywood Out Of Ideas, Faux Snuff Films Edition: Rogue Pictures is remaking Faces of Death, the cult horror flick supposedly depicting the actual deaths of its accidental "stars," promising enough gore and shock value for a YouTube-desensitized generation no longer stirred by endless replays of "trampoline basketball." [Variety]

Perhaps feeling that he's gleaned all the horndogging wisdom longtime mentor and occasional make-out coach Robert Evans has to offer him, preternaturally hacky Rush Hour fauxteur Brett Ratner has now invited a Hollywood legend whose hot-tub-hosted appetites were even more outsized than those of his beloved teacher to work with him on the latest installment of his signature franchise. Today's Variety reports that fugitive director Roman Polanski has been written into Rush Hour 3, currently shooting in Paris, and will play the part of a policeman who will try to interfere with stars Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker's efforts to bicker with one another while crashing a variety of comically undersized French automobiles. Var explains how Ratner recruited Polanski for the role:

The MPAA introduces its latest agents of movie pirate doom: Lucky and Flo, the two cutest, DVD-sniffing black Labs you've ever seen! The pups can't distinguish between pirated and legitimate disks, and can also be thrown off the trail by traffickers clever enough to pack dummy boxes full of frisbees in the same shipment as their contraband product. [Variety]
Certified series-killer Rena Sofer gets recurring roles on both 24 and Heroes, but we imagine the cancellation curse that accompanies her casting will only be strong enough to take down Heroes, the newer, weaker show. [THR]
Dreamy-eyed hunkbot Jake Gyllenhaal will join pointy-chinned ingenue Reese Witherspoon in New Line's Middle East political thriller Rendition, which we fully hope will evolve into a romantic comedy so as not to waste the crippling adoreableness of its leads on weighty matters. [Variety]
Rob Cohen cleverly deleted Stealth from his resume before going in for a meeting about helming the prison movie Scared Straight, tricking New Line into giving him another opportunity to direct. [THR]
FX's relentless pursuit of the self-consciously edgy leads it into a deal with Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy for 4 oz., a drama about the "metamorphosis of a married sportswriter who is a transsexual." [Variety]

After last summer's flirty lunch with the NY Daily News' The Lowdown column, in which interchangeable Wedding Crashers naked person Diora Baird revealed her near-instantaneous mastery of the industry's casting customs, we expected her to quickly achieve the effortless superstardom that is her due. More than a year later, however, Baird's publicist seems to sense that her client's subsequent work in projects like Bachelor Party Vegas and Hot Tamale may have been criminally overlooked, and has decided to enlist Page Six in her efforts to restore momentum to a still-promising career:

Snakes on a Plane's disappointing™ inability to reach the $20 million opening weekend milestone triggered New Line's desperation "Snakes in a Theater" viral marketing campaign, in which a variety of deadly serpents will be released into multiplexes in underperforming regions, building the kind of word-of-mouth buzz that the studio wasn't able to translate from internet obsession into ticket sales. No one was bitten by the two rattlesnakes employed in the campaign's initial run at the AMC Desert Ridge in Phoenix, a misfire that New Line officials blamed on the exhibitor's failure to saturate its popcorn in the snake-provoking pheromones with which it was provided, but promised "six to ten" in-theater fatalities by the film's crucial second-weekend screenings.

There's no point in sugar-coating it, so we'll just come out and say it: The box office numbers don't love you anymore.

As with any self-respecting bad movie, there were no advance press screenings of Snakes on a Plane, so we've had to wait until today to read the reviews. Rotten Tomatoes currently gives it a respectable Tomatometer score of 65%—you wouldn't want any B-horror flick clocking any higher—with a predictable lack of consensus over whether it's so [pick one from column A: good/bad/overhyped] it's [bad/good/overrated]. Here's a round-up of what some of them are saying—and because we are dealing in the always confusing "qualities of badness," we'll also clearly denote whether the reviewer was trying to be positive or negative with their put-downs in each instance:

Say what you will about Samuel L. Jackson, but he's really committed himself to selling Snakes on a Plane. While many members of his trade would now have a dead-eyed, faraway look after weeks of being on the messy end of countless press junket bukkake sessions, Jackson brought what seemed like genuine enthusiasm to his Daily Show appearance last night in pimping his airborne reptilian wares, even inducing a giddy stream of "motherfuckers" from Jon Stewart. But easily our favorite part of the interview comes toward the end of the above clip, in which [SPOILER ALERT] Jackson, who's never met a paycheck he didn't like, reveals he doesn't die in the movie, then nearly defecates with glee at the thought of the negotiations for his sequel contract—he knows he's going to get paid when New Line comes calling on Sunday to sign him up for Snakes on Two Planes and Snakes on a Space Shuttle in 3D.

Variety reports that preternaturally hacky director Brett Ratner may have found a follow-up project to his upcoming Rush Hour 3 sequel shoot, signing on to randomly point a camera at things on the set (props, the craft services table, and, occasionally, actors reciting their lines) of a remake of The Boys From Brazil, the 1978 thriller about a plot to clone Hitler and resurrect the Third Reich. Ratner briefly explains his interest in the project:

With just a precious few days left in which to overhype Snakes on a Plane before its release next Friday, New Line gave Samuel L. Jackson a break from reading scripts for pre-recorded, semi-personalized Snakes on a Voicemail™ promotions ("Hello...JACK. My good friend...STACEY...tells me that you'd like to take some time away from your job as an...ACTUARY...to go see my new movie, in theaters August 18th!") to spend some time going over his Snakes-related anecdotes with a reporter from Time. We've selected one in which Jackson claims to prepare just as thoroughly for his The Man-level work as he does for the more challenging roles he takes to momentarily drown out the sound of the cash register cha-ching he hears each time he's offered a part in well-paying, "exuberant crap":