Sony/Columbia's horror movie Darkness Falls, which drew horrible reviews on Friday, may have topped the box office with $12 million in ticket sales, but the real weekend winner may have been the Miramax musical Chicago, which wound up in third place with $8.2 million, despite the fact that it was being screened in only 616 theaters. The film averaged $13,375 per theater, more than three times the $4,239 average of Darkness. Miramax's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the only other film to be released wide (following showcase screenings in New York and Los Angeles to qualify for Oscar nods), performed reasonably well as it earned $5.8 million on 1,769 screens, or an average of $3,297. The box office was clobbered by the Super Bowl, with admissions dropping to a trickle on Sunday. Nevertheless, the $80 million gross for the weekend for the top 12 movies was up 1.8 percent from a year earlier, when there was no competition from the Super Bowl.

The top ten films over the weekend, according to final figures compiled by Exhibitor Relations (figures in parentheses represent total gross to date): 1. Darkness Falls, Sony, $12,024,917, (New); 2. Kangaroo Jack, Warner Bros., $11,548,247, 2 Wks. ($35,112,415); 3. Chicago, Miramax, $8,238,709, 5 Wks. ($40,386,310); 4. National Security, Sony, $7,308,966, 2 Wks. ($26,040,534); 5. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, New Line, $6,611,705, 6 Wks. ($308,821,306); 6. Catch Me If You Can, DreamWorks, $6,501,059, 5 Wks. ($144,962,124); 7. Just Married, 20th Century Fox, $6,482,600, 3 Wks. ($43,353,177); 8. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Miramax, $5,833,052, 4 Wks. ($6,332,676); 9. About Schmidt, New Line, $5,382,302, 7 Wks. ($37,745,475); 10. The Hours, Paramount, $3,934,284, 5 Wks. ($13,868,754).

In the latest effort to advance the independence of the Walt Disney Co.'s board of directors, four members, each with close ties to Disney chairman Michael Eisner, will reportedly not seek reelection at the board's annual meeting in March, the company said Monday. "People viewed it as Michael Eisner's board," Patrick McGurn of Institutional Shareholder Services told Bloomberg News. "Now it's a stand-alone entity. You can now view this as a meaningful counterbalance to a powerful CEO such as Michael Eisner." One of the departing directors is the principal of an elementary school that Eisner's three children attended. Another is the architect who designed Eisner's Aspen, CO home.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets became the third-highest-grossing international release in history last weekend as its gross rose to $568.2 million, putting it behind only Titanic ($1.2 billion) and the first Harry Potter film ($649.59 million). The film replaces Jurassic Park, which moves to fourth place on the all-time list.

A fifteenth witness in the trial of Indian film producer Bharat Shah has confounded prosecutors by denying previous statements he had allegedly made to police investigators. The prosecution is attempting to show that Shah had been backed in film projects by the underworld and had made numerous telephone contacts with gangster Chhota Shakeel, who is currently living in exile in Pakistan. However, prosecution witnesses have, one after another, turned hostile in court, weakening the prosecution's case.

Spanish police attempting to crack down on CD and DVD piracy have uncovered numerous sweatshop operations controlled by a Chinese mafia, according to published reports. Scotland's Sunday Herald reported that during a recent police sweep in Madrid that netted $1 billion in bootlegged CDs and DVDs -- the biggest haul ever made in the European Union -- police discovered workers living "like semi-slaves," who said that they were rarely allowed to leave the buildings and were sometimes hit with a stick if they faltered.

Sony Chairman Norio Ohga, sidelined by a stroke last year, is stepping down on Thursday and will be replaced by CEO Nobuyuki Idei, the company announced in Tokyo today (Tuesday). A spokeswoman said that Ohga has decided to relinquish his post because he is confident in the leadership of Idei and Sony President Kunitake Ando.

Eighty-year-old Don Hewitt, who had resisted efforts to oust him as producer of CBS's 60 Minutes, agreed Monday to step down in June of next year. Hewitt, who had insisted that he wanted to "die at my desk" had as recently as last month said on the Larry King Live, "My radar tells me that if I come back here a year from now, I will still be the producer of 60 Minutes." He also indicated then that if he was removed, he would move to another network. However, CBS said on Monday that Hewitt had signed a new 10-year deal under which he would act as an adviser and be able to create new projects. In an interview with Bloomberg News, Hewitt suggested that while he is relinquishing the title of 60 Minutes producer to Jeff Fager, "I'll have a hand in the show and every show." He went on to tell the Washington Post that he expected to spend 2004-2005 "supervising the transition to make sure the broadcast I invented still exists." In yet another interview, with the Los Angeles Times, Hewitt said, "I was sad a couple weeks ago when I thought I was seeing my last days around CBS, but now I'll be here for the rest of my life and in my new capacity I'll have a hand in everything." CBS News President Andrew Heyward told the Times that the coming transition "is very respectful to him; no one got the better of anyone."

ABC's hope of pulling off a Monday night comeback following football season by moving its longtime hit The Practice from Sunday to anchor two new dramas, Veritas and Miracles, came a cropper as all three shows produced dismal ratings, pushing ABC into fourth place for the night. Even more worrisome was the significant drop-off in viewership for both new dramas between their first half hour and the second. Audience levels for The Practice were 25 percent below what they were on Sunday nights. Meanwhile, Fox's Joe Millionaire continued to attract huge audiences, with Monday night's episode pulling a 13.7 rating and a 19 share, the highest rating for any network show for the night. It enabled Fox to tie CBS for first place with an average 10.0/14.

TV critics have given Jimmy Kimmel decent notices in his late-night debut on ABC. "Kimmel was overwound, which is not surprising given the pressure on him," Noel Holston writes in Newsday. "He'll be more effective when he quits trying so hard." Several critics suggest that Kimmel reminded them of Conan O'Brien during his early days as a late-night host, when he was still trying to get used to doing whatever he was supposed to do. David Kronke in the Los Angeles Daily News takes note of Kimmel's greeting to his audience before the show, when he said, "This is either going to be a very big night or a very humiliating experience." Kronke suggests it was the former. Meanwhile, Don Kaplan in the New York Post noted that Disney chairman Michael Eisner and ABC boss Lloyd Braun were sitting in the audience as Kimmel and guests George Clooney and Snoop Dogg drank liquor on the air, swore, and in Snoop Dogg's case, gave "the finger" to the camera. "The network had a meltdown," executive producer Daniel Killison told Kaplan.

Owners of the TiVo digital video recorder, who are able to use the device to run "instant replays" anytime they choose, used it more often during the Super Bowl for rerunning commercials than they did for reviewing plays on the field, the Los Angeles Times reported today (Tuesday). TiVo Senior V.P. Brodie Keast told the newspaper, "Viewers watch the content that they find most compelling, even when the most compelling content is the commercials." In the past, network execs have criticized TiVo for touting a feature that allows viewers to skip commercials. Meanwhile Reebok said Monday that 140,000 people had visited its website to download a short film about fictional football player Terry Tate that it had teased in ads during the game. Micky Pant, Reebok's chief marketing officer, told today's Wall Street Journal that the commpany is preparing three other ads featuring Tate to plug three other short films that will be posted on the Web.

Major League Baseball plans to launch a subscription service that will allow baseball fans to watch live video coverage of games over the Internet beginning this year, the New York Times reported today (Tuesday). The Webcasts, the newspaper commented, will "test whether Internet broadcasting is more than just a minor league sport." MLB, which will use the Real Networks video streaming platform, intends to charge $6.00 to $10.00 a month for the service, which will require high-speed broadband connections. "With 16 or 18 million homes on broadband, and nearly everyone at work, that is a big enough sandbox for us to play in," Bob Bowman, head of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, told the Times.

Friday night's telecast of the Japanese animated feature Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) in the Kanto region of the country (which includes Tokyo and Yokohama) produced the highest television ratings of any movie ever broadcast in Japan, Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun reported today (Tuesday), citing figures from Video Research Co. The film, from famed animator Hayao Miyazaki and distributed by Disney in North America, debuted theatrically to ecstatic reviews in the U.S. last October, but critics faulted Disney for not giving it the same sort of promotional and marketing push that the studio gives its own animated films.