1. Twilight - $70.6 million
Multiplex chains were forced to summon crisis counselors after Twilight's $33 million opening day, the screeching tween torment of which rang in shellshocked staffers' ears even as grosses slowed into the weekend. Meanwhile at Summit Entertainment — the indie that bankrolled the the teen-vampire-romance phenomenon — execs are assembling one of the nicest fruit baskets ever to send to Warner Bros., whose bumping of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from Nov. 21 to next summer gave Twilight a green light to plunder at will.

2. Quantum of Solace - $27.4 million
The 007 thriller plunged 60% from its record-breaking opening a week ago, once again triggering Broody Bond's thirst for revenge that will be explored in the series' stake-wielding 2011 installment, Message For Twilight.

3. Bolt - $27 million
Disney's 3-D canine pseudohero took a massive dump on its owner's carpet over the weekend, underperforming by at least $10 million below expectations. After a stern talking to, the pooch is expected to behave a little better for the studio's Thankgsiving guests; another mess like this and it's straight to the shelter.

4. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa - $16 million
On the other hand, runaway zoo animals never require discipline from their masters at DreamWorks Animation, though Madagascar's own 54% drop was unusual for a famliy film, even one featuring the giraffe-voicing talents of David Schwimmer.

5. Role Models - $7.2 million
David Wain's bid for mainstream success has apparently been accepted by, well, the mainstream, with his R-rated mentoring comedy grossing $48 million to date. Congratulations, David!

1. Quantum of Solace - $70.4 million
Having the playing field all to itself couldn't have hurt the second installment of the Daniel Craig franchise reboot, and it didn't: The broodiest Bond yet earned $70.4 million on approximately 5,900 screens—the highest opening not just of any Bond film, but of any espionage drama in history. Today's trade ads boast Solace's hefty take with the agent screaming in agony as Le Chiffre takes a double-knotted rope to his fourth and fifth digits.

2. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa - $36.13 million
David Schwimmer the Giraffe should enjoy his last hurrah before John Travolta the Spayed German Shepherd bolts in to steal his long-necked thunder.

3. Role Models - $11.71 million
Paul Rudd's SNL hosting triumph only helped boost ticket sales for Role Models, bringing in a contingent of horny Ruddites hoping for an unpixelated glimpse of the goodies, and ended up laughing so hard their eyes bled.

4. High School Musical 3: Senior Year - $5.879 million
If your one excuse for not seeing HSM3 so far was the fact that it features neither Officer John McClane nor the phrase, "Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker!" well, then, you've just run out of excuses:

5. Changeling - $4.247 million
If you haven't yet caught The Changeling, we highly recommend you do. Yes, it will require you overlook star Angelina Jolie's well-documented uncoolness for a couple of hours, but this could well be one the last performances from the actress before she wanders off the Ghanaian sunset three decades from now.

• November 14–16, 2008 [Box Office Mojo]

Then, when pressed by Kimmel about injuries suffered while making the film, Kurylenko one-upped her co-star Gemma Arterton by claiming she lost not just a superfluous sixth finger but a third arm as well! Hmmm, a third arm... there's gotta be a 007 sexual innuendo in there somewhere...

• Jimmy Kimmel Live [ABC]

WHAT'S NEW: Quantum of Solace has the wide-release slot to itself, where Daniel Craig's brooding Bond will likely crest above $60 million — by far the highest opening gross of any 007 film to date. We'll call it for $63.7 million despite some pull from leftovers Madagascar 2 and Role Models, themselves expecting $40 million and $10 million respectively in their second weekends.

Your options are a lot better when avoiding the multiplex in LA: Jean-Claude Van Damme's meta-self-biopic JCVD is opening, along with the almost universally acclaimed Catherine Deneuve/Mathieu Amalric dramedy A Christmas Tale. Also: The Alphabet Killers, featuring Eliza Dushku as a police detective (!); the explicit gay Israeli romantic comedy Antarctica; the talky Afghanistan war indie B.O.H.I.C.A. (Army slang for "Bend Over Here it Comes Again"); the Liberian repression doc Pray the Devil Back to Hell; the Jewish basketball chronicle The First Basket; and a new adaptation of Dalton Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun.

THE BIG LOSER: Aside from the glut of indies above, chasing scraps from art-house audiences on their way to DVD — and Soul Men continuing to underperform with $2.2 million or so — today's slate seems to be pretty insulated from disaster. Everyone wins!

THE UNDERDOG: Trainspotting director Danny Boyle is said to have made the best film of his career with Slumdog Millionaire, about a winning 18-year-old contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Except the host thinks he's cheating; he knows too much for a Mumbai slum kid, and his eventual grilling at the hands of the police reveals a sort of Dickens-meets-Bollywood trajectory of lessons learned, knowledge gained ad love lost throughout his youth. Rhapsodizing critics are pushing it for a Best Picture nomination, which, if the Oscar witches at Fox Searchlight have anything to say about it, it will probably receive. But it will need Little Miss Sunshine/Juno traction at the box office, and on 10 screens this weekend, that would probably mean a per-screen average of at least $12,000 to start. Like its hero, we think it's got a good shot.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include Hellboy II: The Golden Army, the gay Hutt-starring Star Wars: The Clone Wars; Takeshi Miike's mystifying Sukiyaki Western Django; and complete-series box sets of both The Sopranos and The Cosby Show.

So is it Bond or nothing for you? Are you saving seats on the Slumdog Millionaire bandwagon? Or is The Clone Wars badness just too tempting to ignore any longer? Be honest! You're among friends.

Ex-Bond Roger Moore has recently voiced his disappointment over the character's devolution into a monosyllabic id, lumbering around hotel lobbies and breaking necks in skimpy gay swimwear. "My Bond," he said wistfully, "was a lover and a giggler." Yes, we remember him well—so it's in his honor that we dedicate the above montage we call Five Decades of James Bond Sex Puns. We hope it Moonrakes your Octopussies off. (Thanks to Nick McGlynn for putting this together, and Maxim for finding the clips.)

• Previously: Ex-Bond Wishes Daniel Craig Was More of a 'Lover and a Giggler' [Defamer]

'I am happy to have done [the series], but I'm sad that it has turned so violent,' Moore says.

'That's keeping up with the times, it's what cinema-goers seem to want and it's proved by the box-office figures,' Moore said in an interview about his memoir, My Word is My Bond.

...While making The Man With the Golden Gun, director Guy Hamilton wanted Bond to be tougher and had him threaten to break Maud Adams' character's arm to get information, he writes.

'I suggested my Bond would have charmed the information out of her by bedding her first. My Bond was a lover and a giggler, but I went along with Guy,' the British actor wrote.

Though Haggis couldn't get the idea of a Bond baby past Daniel Craig, we would have loved to see him pitch a scene where 007 threatens a global supervillain not with a Walther PPK but with an unexpected, high-pitched giggle, eventually capping off Quantum of Solace with a nightgown-clad pillow fight at M's office (oh, the hair-braiding that would ensue!).

[Photo Credit: AP]

• 'James Bond is too violent now,' says former 007 Roger Moore [Daily Mail]

Clearly it depends on whom you ask. By at least one person's standards Batman is already Turkish, and Hancock recently depicted cinema's first drunk, misanthropic superhero as a black dude living on the streets. Global audiences threw $624 million at Will Smith in the latter film, and according to Craig, may be color-blind enough to greet a black Bond with similar largesse:

"After Barack Obama's victory I think we might have reached the moment for a coloured 007. I think the role could easily be played by a black actor, because the character created by Ian Fleming in the '50s has undergone a great deal of evolution and continues to be updated."

Yes, he said "coloured," it's how they roll in the UK, calm down. Craig noted as well that the politically incorrect (at best) Fleming probably wouldn't approve were he alive — a qualification hardly as significant as whether or not viewers who voted in a black president would approve. And even that is an impossible dynamic to parse considering how — if we are the "changed" nation we say we are — Obama's victory owed more to economic and political factors (not to mention pure timing) than the color of his skin. Do we really think we've "reached the moment," or will we only know when the right black Bond comes along?

Beyonce's Wonder Woman scenario is simultaneously simple and more complex. Moviegoers and critics were decidedly stingy to Halle Berry's Catwoman, yielding only $82 million in 2004. Warner Bros., which released Catwoman and whose president Jeff Robinov drew fire last year after allegedly suggesting the studio was done with female leads, has Wonder Woman in limbo (along with Joel Silver) since Joss Whedon abandoned it last year.

So that settled it, we thought, until Beyoncé came along — appropriately Amazonian and looking for her next opportunity coming off her turn as Etta James in the forthcoming Cadillac Records.

"I want to do a superhero movie, and what would be better than Wonder Woman? It would be great. And it would be a very bold choice. A black Wonder Woman would be a powerful thing. It's time for that, right? [...]

"After doing these roles that were so emotional I was thinking to myself, 'OK, I need to be a superhero.' [...] Although, when you think about the psychology of the heroes in the films these days, they are still a lot of work, of course, and emotional. But there's also an action element that I would enjoy."

"It's time for that, right?" Is it? Seriously, we're asking: Is it time for an epochal presidential election to influence Hollywood casting? This town may have helped get Obama elected, but does it have the balls to prove it wasn't a fluke? And are women invited to the party?

• Discuss: Is the World Ready for a Black James Bond? [Cinematical]

• Beyoncé wants to lasso the role of Wonder Woman [Source]

"Haggis had an idea they weren't fond of, and I didn't know if it would work or not," says Forster. "The idea was that Vesper in the last movie, maybe she had a kid, and there would be an orphan out there. It wasn't anything to insult the franchise. But they felt it wasn't particularly Bond — him looking for the kid. I think Paul thought he just leaves the kid, he doesn't deal with it. But [the producers] thought that would be really nasty, too, because Bond was an orphan himself. If he would find a kid, would he just leave it? They were so vehemently against it. That was the only time I saw, really, 'No, we can't do that.' They said, 'Once he finds the kid, Bond can't just leave the kid. It's not right.'"

Could Bond really have weathered the change from secret agent to absentee surrogate father? We have a hard time believing that Bond would lift a finger for a bratty British tyke, but that's OK — his Bond girl has several fingers to spare.

• How James Bond Nearly Became a Father [New York]

The Communist Party in St. Petersburg says Olga Kurylenko, the Ukrainian-born model who plays a Bolivian agent in the latest Bond film, "Quantum of Solace," has betrayed her roots.

"In the name of all communists we appeal to you, prodigal daughter of poor Ukraine and deserter of Slavic world," the party said in an open letter dated Oct. 21 and posted on their Web site Friday.

The Soviet Union "gave you free education, free medical care but nobody knew you would commit an act of intellectual and moral betrayal that you would become a movie kept girl of Bond, who in his movies kills hundreds of Soviet people and citizens of other socialist countries: Cubans, Vietnamese, North Koreans, Chinese and Nicaraguans," the party said.

Sergei Malenkovich, head of the party's regional organization, told The Associated Press..."In this movie they wanted to show that a Ukrainian girl sleeps with an American. It's a part of information and psychological war."

Sure, Bond is actually British, not American, but we can understand how a minor detail like that would get lost amidst the waves of devastation and shame washing (equally) over all the deserted Slavs. For her own sake, we hope that Kurylenko will renounce her status as a "movie kept girl of Bond" before she suffers a tragic, 007-worthy fate as her nude body is recovered from the center of a sinister series of Russian nesting dolls.

• Russia communists say Ukraine Bond girl a traitor [Yahoo!]

After the jump: Is it a Dr. No or a Dr. Yes? Chinese weigh in on the new Bond film.

· A&E has picked up a second season of Benjamin Bratt series The Cleaner. [THR]
· The People's Glorious Bureau of Cinematic Cleansing has deemed Quantum of Solace appropriate for Chinese eyes, as the latest Bond film will screen in that country without a single edit. [Variety]

· "It's James Bond, licence to bore....Bond is a boorish oaf who simply rushes from country to country with the manic speed of Jason Bourne, including sequences shot in Panama, Chile, Italy, Mexico and Austria, in a plot about holding a country to ransom over its water supply...Quantum of Solace lacks any wit, ironic or otherwise, which has been a strength of so many 007 films...At around one hour 40 minutes, this Bond is shorter than most. Somehow it felt longer." [Times Online]
· "Quantum Of Solace doesn’t seem like a major entry in the Bond canon. Well under two hours long, it’s shorter and more frenetic than most of its predecessors, and an often-jolting experience to watch. Loose ends about. What it does have, though, above all, is vigour." [The Independent]
· "I was disappointed there was so little dialogue, flirtation and characterisation in this Bond: Forster and his writers Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade clearly thought this sort of sissy nonsense has to be cut out in favour of explosions." [The Guardian]
· "One wonders if director Marc Forster and screenwriters Paul Haggis and Neal Purvis haven't tried a little too hard to distance the film from traditional Bond plots. The expository dialogue scenes can be dull, and cram in so many machinations and double-crossings that it's easy to lose track of who's duping whom." [Telegraph]
· [SPOILERS] "Mostly it doesn't feel like a Bond film at all. Not once does Craig say: "The name's Bond. James Bond." There's no Q or his gadgets. Heck, we even see Bond in a cardigan. There are no risque quips or arched eyebrows. This Bond is a soul in torment having lost the love of his life when Vesper Lynd drowned...It doesn't disappoint - just don't expect the brilliance of Casino Royale. [Daily Mail]
· "The raw nature of the film may put off some who yearn for the days of gizmos, gadgets and Bond quips as he dispenses with faceless opponents...It's a film that feels like the second part of a trilogy, with this being the bleaker second act." [BBC]

The 22-year-old starlet, who plays Agent Fields in the upcoming Quantum Of Solace, admitted she was born with six fingers on each hand.

After undergoing an operation to have them removed, she still has bumpy scars as remainders of her extra digits.

The extra fingers were 'tied', which causes them to fall off naturally.

She tells Esquire magazine: 'It's my little oddity that I'm really proud of. It makes me different.'

Earlier this year, she revealed she was also born with a crumpled ear, which was corrected through surgery.

She said: 'I was born with lots of deformities.'

Whatever surgical adjustments Arterton required were a smashing success, as the actress bears almost no resemblance to the duodenary-digited, crumple-eared duckling she was in her youth. Still, our minds can't help but wander to the alternate outcome, and the dazzling possibilities of Bond's deadly Secret Service associate 0012—the only agent capable of typing the nuclear-dismantling codes into the evil Dr. Oilhoarder's [caution: link contains spoiler] supercomputer fast enough to avoid the obliteration of Western Europe.

• 'I was born with six fingers on each hand' reveals Bond Girl Gemma Arterton in startling interview [Daily Mail]

Asked if he agreed with fans who have laughed at the new name, Craig told GQ: "No, because I was involved in making the decision. Names were coming out, some ludicrous stuff was going back and forth – I can't remember exactly, but you know the sort of thing: 'The Blood On Your Face'. I knew I didn't want 'death', 'die', 'bleed' or any of those things in the title.

"We had it written down on boards and we'd literally go and sit in rooms and stare at this title. If you look at 'Q's, they're really weird in a title.

"As soon as it came out, people were saying, 'Ooh, it sounds like Harry Potter.' No, it's Quantum of Solace. I was saying, 'It's a Bond title! The name of a Bond film is not about anything. Live And Let Die? Octopussy? What does it mean? It means very little. We've got nothing to worry about."

Though we mourn the loss of the producer-suggested title You Only Bleed When You Die From Death, we have to agree with Craig that the Bond names typically mean very little (and that Q's are totally rad!). Still, why didn't the star insist on his perilous title's incorporation into the film's theme song? Jack White yowling words that rhyme with "solace" might have provided the Bond theme with the frisson it so desperately needed — or at least a great many more lines about undersung Kojak star Telly Savalas.

[Photo Credit: AP]

• Daniel Craig: Bond film name Quantum of Solace was my idea [Telegraph]

• Jack White slams Coca-Cola for using James Bond song [NME]

1. Brad Pitt will win an Academy Award. We know the post-Toronto establishment has all but engraved Mickey Rourke's name on this year's Best Actor Oscar (hell, even Rourke has engraved his name on this year's Best Actor Oscar), but taking both The Wrestler (release date TBD) and Pitt's epic The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (12/25) sight unseen, we'll take the aging-backward-on-other-people's-bodies gimmick over the gritty indie comeback 10 times out of 10. Not that it won't be close: Brad Grey will spend more on his old pal's campaign than Fox Searchlight is probably ready to drop on Rourke's, but Rourke will be the more accessible nominee to the media. Look for dark horse Sean Penn (Milk) to split the field late; Focus Features won't settle for another 0-fer in '08.

2. W. (10/17) will tip the election to the GOP. Opening less than three weeks before Election Day, the film will be too muddled to move the Democrats yet irreverent enough to galvanize the Republican base against Hollywood one more time before voting. Oliver Stone will be recognized as the new Ralph Nader.

3. You're going to miss Don LaFontaine a lot more than you think. Otherwise execrable trailers like this one for The Haunting of Molly Hartley (10/31) acquired bittersweet relevance overnight:

4. The Weinstein Company will muscle its way back to prominence. Harvey had a relatively hemorrhage-free summer, closed out by his $16 million-grossing (and counting) Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Meanwhile, Zack and Miri Make a Porno (10/31) left Toronto with goodwill to spare, the LA immigrant saga Crossing Over (10/24) has Harrison Ford, Sean Penn and others channeling Crash, and the company bumped up The Reader for Kate Winslet Oscar consideration. (NB: The Rourke Factor also reportedly inspired Harvey to finally slot his long-shelved Killshot on Nov. 7.) The Weinsteins being the Weinsteins, of course, the operation could crash at any time, but at least the ensuing conflagration promises Hindenberg levels of spectacle. That's our Harvey.

5. Owen Wilson will emerge from, return to hiding after explaining the trailer to Marley & Me (12/25). That is all.

6. The Soloist (11/21) will be better than it sounds. But it sounds great, right? Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx, directed by Pride and Prejudice/Atonement helmer Joe Wright? Alas, the logline: "A schizophrenic, homeless musician from Skid Row, Los Angeles dreams of playing at Walt Disney Concert Hall." Based on a true story, natch: Downey Jr. plays the real-life LAT reporter who befriends him, warning Foxx behind the scenes about the perils of going full-schizo. All things being equal, we like their chances.

7. Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (10/24) will be this year's unlikeliest tearjerker. Not just for its devastating, beautiful final act, but also for the probability that Sony Classics will weep red ink when it makes about five cents at the box office.

8. Twilight (11/21) will only be the second-best vampire movie released this fall. You won't find Let the Right One In (10/24) on the cover of EW, but you'll find the Swedish export in a lot of festival juries' hearts since last spring. Half coming-of-age romance and half vengeful horror epic, it picks up the story of a bullied 12-year-old boy whose sweet new girlfriend next door ends up being several thousand years older than she looks — and behaves accordingly. Genre distributor Magnet Releasing might only get this on a hundred screens, but watch the word-of-mouth and top-10-list acclaim bump it into sleeper status by the end of the year.

9. Extreme Movie will open to a $0 gross after viewers confuse it with the other, less-illustrious Movie franchise. But you can be prepared: Extreme Movie is the teen sex comedy starring Michael Cera and Frankie Muniz; Disaster Movie et. al. are the ones whose auditoriums smell faintly of piss. Know the difference!

10. Daniel Craig will miss 2006. Casino Royale was a surprising, sporadically brilliant reboot, but the honeymoon is over: Quantum of Solace's trailer isn't dazzling anyone; the title is stillborn; Sony couldn't settle on a US release date (it finally chose 11/14); and unfairly or not, franchise obsessives want nothing to do with new director Marc Forster. And all this after the Bond curse cost Craig part of his finger. It's a cruel world, but not as cruel as it'll seem after Defiance (12/12), the WWII Jewish resistance drama in which he and screen bros Liev Schrieber and Jamie Bell fight off Nazis during the invasion of Poland. Among the last of Paramount Vantage's orphaned prestige titles, and opening opposite Doubt, an expanded Frost/Nixon and The Day the Earth Stood Still, it's bound to knock Craig back to stardom's second tier for a while to come.

11. Beverly Hills Chihuahua (10/3) will astonish and amaze. But you already knew that.

• Quantum of Solace [007.com]

BOND MOVIE ROLE FOR NEW FORD KA

COLOGNE, August 15, 2008 - The highly-anticipated new James Bond adventure, 'Quantum of Solace', will feature a cameo appearance from Ford's fresh-faced new model, the all-new Ford Ka.

Ford's cheeky new small car will make its screen debut alongside the film's beautiful but feisty leading lady, Olga Kurylenko. Kurylenko plays Camille, a woman with her own personal mission and who quickly becomes an unlikely ally for Bond.

The 'Quantum of Solace' Ka is unique with metallic gold paint and an exclusive exterior graphics and interior trim combination.

"The new Ka is the perfect match for the character of Camille - adventurous, individual and thoroughly modern," says Ford of Europe's Chief Operating Officer, Stephen Odell. "We are delighted that the launch of the film coincides with the launch of such a significant new model for Ford of Europe."

The special 'Quantum of Solace' Ka was created by Ford of Europe's Design team, in collaboration with the movie's Oscar ® award-winning production designer, Dennis Gassner. The Ka's cameo continues Ford of Europe's relationship with the James Bond films, following the debut appearance of the latest Ford Mondeo, in the 2006 blockbuster, 'Casino Royale'.

Twelve years after the original Ford Ka wowed customers with its modern spirit and what has proved to be a remarkably age-less design, its successor looks set to repeat its impact.

The new model retains all the qualities which made the Ka so popular - compact size, great looks, lively dynamics and fun personality - but presents them in a fresh new package. Further technical details of the new Ford Ka will be revealed closer to launch later in 2008.

'Quantum of Solace' is produced for EON Productions by Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli and distributed by Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Directed by Marc Forster, the film stars Daniel Craig as the legendary secret agent, James Bond and opens in the UK and France on October 31st, then elsewhere November 7th.

The all-new Ka enjoys the spotlight of its own at the 2008 Paris Motor Show, on October 2.

# # #

"I guess they are going for clean-cut and boring. When I do release mine – and I am tempted to do it on the same day – this would be the bigger hit. If they change their minds, I’m waiting!”

...She added, “I do think they could have waited a bit. If they want a worldwide hit, I have them all up here [pointing to her beehive]."

Reportedly, Winehouse's Bond theme is only hamstrung by her inability to settle on a name; having found that the existing Bond titles "Die Another Day" and "All Time High" hit too close to home, she's settled on three potential options: "Speedball," "MoonBlaaaaker," and "Cunts Like Kanye."

• Amy's Bond revenge [New Magazine]