The 3-D film Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert failed to turn the box office topsy-turvy in its second week as it had in its debut a week earlier. Held over for a second week, the concert film, which originally was due to run for one week only, drew an estimated $10.5 million. Still, that worked out to more than $15,000 per theater, far more than the two top films, Fool's Gold and Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, could claim. Fool's Gold, which was greeted with overwhelmingly poor reviews, many of which suggested that its major attraction was star Matthew McConaughey's abs, took in $23.8 million. As expected, the primary audience turned out to be older women. In an interview with the Associated Press, Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers, attributed the movie's success to "a great marketing campaign, two appealing stars, and reviews be damned." Jenkins, which stars Martin Lawrence, performed about as expected with a take of $17.1 million.

The top ten films for the weekend, according to studio estimates compiled by Media by Numbers: 1. Fool's Gold, $22 million; 2. Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, $17.1 million; 3. Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert, $10.5 million; 4. The Eye, $6.6 million; 5. Juno, $5.73 million; 6. 27 Dresses, $5.7 million; 7. The Bucket List, $5.3 million; 8. Rambo, $4.1 million; 9. Meet the Spartans, $4.075 million; 10. There Will Be Blood, $4.073 million.

Time Warner executives are considering folding New Line into its Warner Bros. division or keeping the brand as a separate production unit with Warner Bros. handling its distribution, the Wall Street Journal reported today (Monday), citing people familiar with the situation. The newspaper said that in either scenario, New Line would be reduced to producing low-budget films as it once did instead of blockbusters like its recent Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Journal did not indicate what would become of The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings prequel, which New Line is scheduled to produce this year.

Snubbed in the voting for Oscar nominations, the British film Atonement won the top award at the U.K.'s BAFTA awards Sunday -- Britain's equivalent of the Oscars. Daniel Day-Lewis was the winner of the best actor award for There Will Be Blood, while Marion Cotillard won best actress honors for her performance as singer Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, received the best director award for No Country for Old Men.

China's Film Bureau has informed the Weinstein Co. that it will not issue permits for the studio to film Shanghai, starring Gong Li and John Cusack, in Shanghai. Word of the refusal apparently caught director Mikael Hafstrom by surprise. According to Daily Variety, Hafstrom had spent the last six months in Shanghai preparing to shoot the film. "This obviously comes as a shock to all of us," Hafstrom told the trade publication. "We don't know exactly why we have been turned down." Variety speculated that the Chinese may have been concerned about the plot line, which includes drugs, sex, and war with the Japanese. (The movie is set in 1941.) Hafstrom indicated that the film is now likely to be shot in Hong Kong, which, although now officially part of China, is granted a considerable degree of self rule.

Roy Scheider, best known for his roles as the police chief in Jaws and the choreographer in All That Jazz, died Sunday in Little Rock, Arkansas, at age 75. The cause of death was not disclosed, although a spokeswoman at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Hospital said that he had been treated for multiple myeloma, a type of bone-marrow cancer that affects plasma cells.

News Corp President Peter Chernin and Disney CEO Robert Iger were being credited for hammering out a new three-year tentative contract with the Writers Guild of America that will likely bring their 14-week-old strike to an end on Tuesday. Referring to negotiators for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, WGA executive director David Young told the Los Angeles Times, "We spent six months in a room with people who did not want to negotiate with us. ... All of this that we have here today was negotiated over the last two or three weeks with two CEOs who were willing to negotiate." Most analysts agreed that the key to the agreement was a concession on the part of the studio negotiators to give writers a percentage of distributors' revenues for videos streamed over the Internet in the third year of the contract. (During the first two years they'll receive a one-time-only payment of $1,200.) However, some observers have noted that in an era of swiftly changing technology, three years is a lifetime; for example, storage devices capable of recording thousands of television shows may be so inexpensive by then that it will no longer be necessary to distribute programs over the Internet. Instead, all of a viewer's favorite programs -- and then some -- will likely be automatically recorded for later on-demand viewing.

Several analysts have suggested that the strike will end with each side losing. Ratings at each of the networks except Fox are down substantially since the strike began, with advertisers being given rebates or "make goods" because of the ratings fall. Producers of scripted television shows have been informed by the networks that "efficiencies" are being instituted that in some cases will result in the networks skipping the pilot process. Networks often pay as much as $2 million to develop a pilot, only to decide later that it is unsuitable to develop into a series. Indeed, the networks are likely to cut back on scripted TV series in general after audiences demonstrated during the strike that they preferred many cheap game shows and reality series. With fewer pilots and scripted series in production, writers are likely to find work opportunities substantially curtailed. Moreover, while it had been presumed earlier that existing series whose production had been cut short by the strike would resume once it was settled, several reports cast doubt on whether marginally rated shows would return. It had previously been reported that Fox's 24 would be postponed for a year and that ABC's Lost would probably have its 16 episodes cut to 13 this season.

The tentative agreement between the writers and producers reached over the weekend appears to have rescued the February 24 80th Annual Academy Awards telecast. At a news conference on Sunday, WGA chief negotiator David Young suggested that keeping the Oscars hostage, in effect, helped the union leverage a settlement. "It was going to be a huge thing for the industry to lose the Oscars," he said. Nevertheless, with less time to prepare, Academy Awards producers are likely to simplify production numbers and entirely eliminate customarily elaborate filmed pieces. And as the principal entertainer of the night, Jon Stewart is expected to face even greater pressure than usual to keep things light and lively.

CBS's telecast of the 50th Annual Grammy Awards dominated the ratings Sunday night, scoring a 12.4 rating an a 19 share. While the audience dipped nearly 10 percent from last year, ratings for the other networks also showed erosion from last year -- as they have throughout most of the season. Amy Winehouse was the big winner at the televised ceremonies, capturing five awards, including record of the year, "Rehab." She was forced to watch the awards and perform her numbers at a studio in London after being denied a visa to visit the U.S. -- presumably because of her history of drug abuse.

Nielsen Media Research has apologized to its clients on Friday for numerous recent delays in reporting ratings for TV programs, explaining that they have resulted from the increased amount of data that is now is required to be processed -- including information on the use of digital video recorders. But the delays have angered TV executives charged with analyzing the Nielsen data provided and applying them to sales pitches. "This is the currency of the business," Alan Wurtzel, president of research for NBC, told today's (Monday) New York Times. Wurtzel asked why Nielsen did not plan for the new demands, expressing a concern that Catherine Herkovic, head of national television client services for Nielsen, has acknowledged as legitimate. "I don't think we did as good a job as we should have in anticipating these spikes," she told the Times.

A substantial segment of the millions of people with analog TV sets that receive signals over the air may not be able to view their local stations -- even if they purchase an analog-to-digital converter box, when the switchover to digital occurs next year, according to Centris, a market research firm in Los Angeles, and reported by today's (Monday) New York Times. "For the people with rabbit-ear antennas, I would say at least 50 percent won't get the channels they were getting," Dr. Oded Bendov, a consultant hired to supervise the analog-to-digital transition at the transmitter at the Empire State Bldg. in New York said. "I would say a lot of people are going to be very unhappy." He pointed out that digital signals do not travel as far as analog signals. Overall, he estimates, 5.9 million people will discover that they cannot receive TV pictures once the transition occurs.

Dolby announced today (Monday) that it has developed a new sound-processing system for mobile phones that it said will bring "rich, vibrant surround sound to music, movies, and television programs." The system was unveiled at the 2008 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. In a statement, François Modarresse, Vice President of Marketing, Dolby Laboratories, said, "We developed Dolby Mobile to help create products that stir the senses and excite people's imaginations so the industry can deliver on the promise of mobile entertainment."