FIRST BOX OFFICE: New Years Eve #1, Breaking Dawn #2, The Sitter Weak #3

FRIDAY 5 PM: I’m in a hurry so this is just a quickie. No surprises since Warner Bros’ New Years Eve was expected to unseat Summit’s Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 after three straight weeks at No. 1. Fox’s The Sitter is looking even worse than the lowered expectations going into this North American weekend. Refined numbers and full analysis tonight: 1. New Years Eve (Warner Bros) NEW [3,505 Theaters] Friday $6.5M, Estimated Weekend$19M 2.Breaking Dawn Part 1 (Summit) Week 4 [3,605 Theaters] Friday $3M, Estimated Weekend $10M 3. TheSitter (Fox) NEW [2,750 Theaters] Friday $3.5M, Estimated Weekend$9.5M 4. The Muppets (Disney) Week 3 [3,328 Theaters] Friday $2M, Estimated Weekend $8M 5. Hugo (Paramount) Week 3 [2,608 Theaters] Friday $1.8M, Estimated Weekend $6.5M 6.Arthur Christmas (Sony) Week 3 [3,272 Theaters] Friday $1.3M, Estimated Weekend $5.5M 7. The Descendants (Fox Searchlight) Week 4 [876 Theaters] Friday $1.2M, Estimated Weekend $4.2M Specialty Openings: Paramount’s Young Adult is looking “a little soft” in 8 theaters, rival studios tell me, while Focus Features’European hitTinker Tailor Soldier Spy “looks pretty good” in 4 runs.

Dallatana in your thoughts Zodiak in S. Europe

ROME -- Italian TV professional Ilaria Dallatana might be the brand new Boss of Zodiak Media Group Southern Europe, altering Giorgio Gori who walked reduced November to go in politics. Dallatana can be a former controlling director of Magnolia, the prominent content factory active in Italia and also the country, which she co-founded with Gori. Magnolia, which introduced "Celebrity Survivor" to Italians, was acquired by Italo multimedia conglom P Agostini in 2007, the identical year it bought Zodiak Entertainment, the world entertainment giant that's now Zodiak Media Group, after its acquisition of RDF USA this season. Simultaneously, Zodiak Media Group Boss David Frank remains hired prexy of Magnolia and Boss of Zodiak Media Group Latin America, the machine launched in April that targets Hispanic auds inside the U.S., additionally to South usa, Mexico, Colombia together with the areas in Southern and Guatemala. Both of these game game titles were formerly held by Gori. Zodiak's top characteristics include "Wife Swap" and "The Important Thing Uniform." They are also entrepreneurs of mega Euro small "Titanic: Blood stream and Steel," funded having a consortium introduced by Italy's P Angelis Group. Contact Nick Vivarelli at nvivarelli@gmail.com

'Transformers' Director Michael Bay Weighs In on the Importance of Sound (Q&A)

This story first appeared in the Dec. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.our editor recommendsAndy Serkis on Who Sends Him Hate Mail; Why Oscar Should Rethink Animated Category (Q&A)Why 'Tintin' and 'Rango' Stand Out Among This Year's Animated Awards Contenders (Opinion) For most of Academy Awards history, animation and visual effects have competed in separate categories. But as the line between VFX and animation gets increasingly blurry, animated films like Kung Fu Panda 2 or Puss in Boots -- as well as the performance-capture-based The Adventures of Tintin -- could emerge as contenders in the VFX category. The VFX branch made a loud statement about what constitutes a visual effect in 2007 when it put CG-animated Ratatouille and motion-capture-based Beowulf on its list of 15 Oscar contenders. PHOTOS: The Big Screen's Evolution of Talking Animals So what's the difference between animation and VFX? "It's ambiguous," admits DreamWorks Animation's Alex Parkinson, VFX supervisor on Kung Fu Panda 2. "Everything you see in an animated movie is a visual effect." One notoriously tough effect to render in live action is computer-generated water -- which is also tough to animate. "The tools and techniques are exactly the same," says Parkinson. "The difference is that on a traditional live-action movie, you are matching a plate, which has its own complications, and on an animated movie, you are creating the world from scratch and defining the rules of the world a lot more." PHOTOS: 10 Inappropriately Sexy Cartoon Characters That may amount to no difference at all in the animation-acclimated eyes of VFX branch voters. The CG water in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 could be judged alongside the CG water created for Tintin and Panda. Not since Tim Burton's 1993 stop-motion classic The Nightmare Before Christmas has animation earned a VFX Oscar nomination. This time, 2012 could be the year. PHOTO GALLERY: View Gallery 2010's Animated Movie Box Office Scorecard Related Topics Oscars Kung Fu Panda 2 Oscars 2012 Puss in Boots The Adventures of Tintin Animation

TV Ratings: 'X Factor' and Steady 'Bones' Put Fox on Top, 'Community' Hits Two Month High

After four decades on the airwaves and six weeks on the sidelines, Jim Ladd is moving to the satellites.our editor recommendsClear Channel Station Offers 'The Last DJ' Jim Ladd Three Hours for Farewell Show Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at Cal State Northridge: Concert ReviewTom Petty Discusses Influences, Career During SiriusXM Q&A Session SiriusXM has hired the revered Los Angeles DJ to do a nightly "freeform" show on the satcaster's Deep Tracks channel starting in January. The four-hour live show will be Ladd's first national program. For the Lonesome L.A. Cowboy, it's a match made in rock 'n' roll heaven. "As I have always done throughout my career, I will be choosing all my own music," Ladd said. "I will be playing everything I want - from Pink Floyd to Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, from the Doors to Moby Grape - freely and with no playlists." Ladd, who is known for creating thematic sets of music and encouraging input from his audience, added, "I'll also be taking phone calls from listeners all across America." The inspiration for Petty's 2002 song "The Last DJ," Ladd was fired from L.A. rock mainstay KLOS-FM on Oct. 26. He was one of more than two dozen employees at the station and sister outlet KABC-AM who were let go in the wake of Cumulus Radio's acquisition of Citadel Broadcasting. Ladd, 63, was on his third stint at KLOS, his first having started in 1971. He had been on the night shift at the station since 1997. "Traditional FM radio has turned its back on the very thing that made rock radio the magical experience it was intended to be," he says. "SiriusXM is kicking down the doors of the stagnant, preprogrammed fodder that passes for radio today by encouraging me to do my freeform show so we can all share this experience live as it happens." SiriusXM's Deep Tracks channel spotlights "a generation's musical stash," a niche that's right in Ladd's wheelhouse. He began his radio career in 1969 at erstwhile Long Beach station KNAC-FM, then moved to KLOS. He joined rival KMET in 1974 and became a late-night L.A. institution until that station switched formats and morphed in KTWV The Wave in 1987. At KMET, Ladd produced and hosted the nationally syndicated program Innerview. Ladd says he'll call on relationships cultivated over the years for his SiriusXM show. "I'll be inviting the biggest rock stars in the world, many of whom I am proud to call my friends, to join me in the studio and commenting on the world around us by using the most compelling music of our time," he said. Ladd, who will do the show from Los Angeles, joins a channel that also features weekly shows hosted by Bob Dylan and Petty. "Jim Ladd is a classic rock radio icon who turned curating a list of songs into an art form," SiriusXM president and chief content officer Scott Greenstein said. "We are proud and excited to welcome his freeform style to SiriusXM." Related Topics Bob Dylan Pink Floyd Tom Petty Jim Ladd

American Pie's Jason Biggs Lawyers Up on The Good Wife

Jason Biggs Jason Biggs is headed to court on The Good Wife, TVGuide.com has confirmed. The American Pie actor, 33, will play a lawyer who is represented by Lockhart & Gardner when he's sued for refusing to release the name of one of his clients, according to TVLine, which first reported the casting. No airdate has been set for the episode. First look: Jennifer Carpenter on The Good Wife Biggs was last seen on CBS' short-lived comedy Mad Love, which was canceled after one season last spring. He will next star in the latest American Pie sequel, American Reunion, which hits theaters in April. The Good Wife airs Sundays at 9/8c on CBS.

REVIEW: Ralph Fiennes Takes a Dud of a Play and Turns It into a Not-Bad Coriolanus

It’s dangerous to underestimate modern-day reinterpretations of Shakespeare, a la Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, not because Shakespeare necessarily needs to be modernized, but because it’s astonishing how much retooling, rejiggering and restuffing he can withstand: His work is like a magic carpet bag that never gets filled up or worn out. So I was curious about Ralph Fiennes’s directorial debut, Coriolanus, in which Fiennes himself stars as Caius Martius Coriolanus, the uppity Roman general who finds himself in a pickle when the hungry people of Rome, suffering from a food shortage, decree that their plight is his fault. Proud of his military service and disdainful of those who haven’t similarly fought for their country, he denounces the poor, hungry masses, accusing them of, among other things, having bad breath. That plunges Coriolanus into a public-relations nightmare from which he can’t recover, the beginning of the end. When I saw Coriolanus at the Berlin Film Festival last February, no one I talked to — not even the random sampling of the British critics I know — had actually read the play. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have read it. But now that I’ve seen Fiennes’s version, I have some idea why the material doesn’t always find its way into the basic curriculum: It’s kind of a dud. No wonder it was the butt of an old Saturday Night Live joke, in which Robin Williams plays a Shakespearean stand-up who, after Coriolanus flops at the Globe, is cast in the lead of the theater’s next production, Hamlet, prompting the line, “Is that a dagger I see, or are you just glad to see me?” Then again, Fiennes isn’t exactly laughing boy, so Coriolanus isn’t such an odd choice for his debut film — and he doesn’t do half badly with it, either. Fiennes played the title role in the play 11 years ago on the London stage, and apparently, he’s been turning it over in his mind ever since. The resulting picture drags in places, but Fiennes works hard to keep the rhythm going: He stages hand-to-hand combat sequences and knife fights as if he were making a smart action movie, not adapting Shakespeare, which is precisely the point. He told The Guardian, “If Shakespeare was alive today, I think he would write very easily for the cinema,” and he’s probably right. Nothing perks an audience up like a good rumble, and Shakespeare knew just how and when to drop ‘em in. The cutting in Fiennes’s action sequences is clean and clear, not choppy. And Coriolanus’s tussles with his sometime-rival, sometime-cohort Tullus Aufidius (played by an amazingly not-horrible, if not exactly good, Gerard Butler) are worked out with the right mix of outright male aggression and twisted mutual admiration. It’s only when the two find themselves in the clinch, their musclebound arms wrapped firmly around each other’s necks, that they realize they’re just two sides of the same coin. This Coriolanus is set in, as a title card wittily tells us, “A place calling itself Rome,” and if it isn’t exactly the real Rome (Fiennes shot the picture in Belgrade), it still has the feel of a modern, besieged big city. (The screenplay is by John Logan, who also adapted Hugo for Martin Scorsese.) The angry mob Coriolanus faces is a grass-roots terrorist group; in their rage and hunger they storm Rome’s “Central Grain Depot,” a bit of made-up silliness that’s perfectly believable in the movie’s context. (At times, Coriolanus somewhat resembles Alfonso Cuarn’s dystopian fantasy Children of Men.) And if there are slack patches in the narrative, Fiennes and his fellow actors get us through them efficiently enough. Fiennes’s Coriolanus is a noble hard-ass with a scarred face and a shaved pate. He’s charismatic in a chilly way, and sympathetic only in the sense that, given his taciturn, rigid character, we can usually tell where he’s coming from. He’s hard to care for, but not easy to turn away from. But the sleekest weapon in Fiennes’s arsenal is Vanessa Redgrave, who plays Coriolanus’s tough-love mom, Volumnia. If Coriolanus is cool as steel, we can see where he gets it: Volumnia is his female counterpart, his true partner in his life’s work, as the story’s incestuous undertones suggest. (The young actress Jessica Chastain plays Coriolanus’s retreating, suffering wife, Virgilia.) Redgrave’s Volumnia has the carriage of a warrior queen, her voice the smoothness and the bite of honey still in the comb — she makes even the play’s densest language seem as if it were written yesterday, not 500 years ago. In choosing Redgrave, Fiennes went out and hired the best. She’s modernity and timelessness in one magnificent package. Editor’s note: This review appeared earlier, in a slightly different form, in Stephanie Zacharek’s Berlin Film Festival coverage. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.

'Juan in the Dead' stumbles to U.K., Japan

'Juan in the Dead' offers U.K., Japan sales.BUENOS AIRES -- Metrodome has already established U.K. rights and Fine Films has nabbed Japanese rights to Alejandro Brugues' "Juan in the Dead," Cuba's first zombie comedy.Alfredo Calvino's Latinofusion, "Dead's" telemarketer, offered the film to Germany's Panda Storm and Russia's Cinema Prestige straight off its Toronto world preem.Calvino may also be settling France, Mexico, South usa and Colombia, he mentioned.John Sloss and Bart Walker's Cinetic Media boarded "Dead" at Toronto to repetition a U . s . States purchase, that's now in advanced discussions, Calvino added.The splatstick fiesta has Alexis Diaz p Villegas just like a 40-year-old slacker who, each time a zombie outbreak infests Cuba, tries to turn some payday slaying families' undead relatives."Dead" segued from Toronto for the Austin, Chicago, Rio, Scar del Plata, Stockholm and Leeds fests, nabbing Leeds' Fanomenon Audience Award.The pic makes its Latin American bow within the Havana Film Festival this month.Despite its barbs, Brugues' demands "Dead" can be a "fun" comedy, not serious political allegory. But Cubans will ultimately obtain own cadaver shamblefest."We expect an enormous Cuban crowd, all thirsting for blood stream," Calvino excited.Latinofusion has furthermore acquired "Expiration Date," from Mexico's Kenya Marquez. A non-linear dark comedy/mystery overflowing with the acting talents of lead Damian Alcazar, "Date," was one of the standout hits while using public at Mexico's Morelia Fest. The first sort Guadalajara fest director's helming debut won its audience prize, together with a jury special mention.James Youthful brought with this article. Contact the number newsroom at news@variety.com