The major film studios earned a record total of $37.3 billion from all sources for their movies last year, an 18-percent increase from the $31.6 billion in 2001, according to figures released by the Motion Picture Association to member studios and published in today's (Wednesday) Daily Variety. The surge was driven by a 31-percent rise in DVD sales and was also helped by the softening dollar in overseas theatrical markets. In the U.S., revenue from sales to TV outlets was up 11 percent.

Harry Potter director Chris Columbus, participating in a promotional event near London on Tuesday to launch the DVD release of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, said that he was particularly delighted that the DVD, in its "extras" package, includes deleted scenes from the theatrical release that people who read the book will be familiar with. Meanwhile, Video Store magazine reported today (Wednesday) that Warner Bros. Home Video wants to avoid the situation that occurred last year when it "oversaturated the market" by distributing far too many copies of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. WHV exec Mark Horak told the magazine that he wants to ship the sequel in the "right quantity." "Nobody benefits from overshipment," he said.

Premiere magazine has selected Steven Spielberg to top its annual "Power List" of Hollywood's most influential people, calling him "the Tiger Woods of the movies." No actors were included in the top ten, which, after Spielberg, included only the names of producers. The magazine said that Tom Hanks (#13) was the most bankable star in the business, followed in order by Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts. Reese Witherspoon jumped from #96 last year to #32 this year, the biggest improvement for anyone on the magazine's list.

Elaine Stritch's hit one-woman show Elaine Stritch at Liberty, in which she reminisces amusingly about her career and personal life, including her battle with alcoholism, and sings some of the musical numbers from her hit shows, will be turned into a theatrical movie by documentary filmmakers D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob, according to published reports. Most of the film was shot during Stritch's performances in London last fall. HBO is backing the film, but plans to release it first in theaters to allow it to qualify for Oscar consideration. In a statement, HBO original-programming chief Sheila Nevins said, "Elaine Stritch is a larger-than-life character who never fails to dazzle a theater audience. I'm tickled pink that HBO will be bringing this electrifying performer to moviegoers and TV viewers."

Producer Ismail Merchant (Remains of the Day, Howards End, A Room With a View) has observed that the success in 2002 of such "quite sensible films" as About Schmidt, The Hours, Far From Heaven, Chicago and Catch Me If You Can shows that Hollywood studios "have become conscious of making better films." In an interview with UPI, Merchant decried the abundance of mediocre films turned out by the industry each year. He said he was baffled that "people are so thickheaded in the top [studio] positions that they can't see what is really good in a script and what is bad, and they would just ... do the bad ones."

A newly restored version of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times -- his last silent movie, even though it was made in 1936 -- has been selected to close the Cannes Film Festival on May 25, festival officials announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, the Times of India reported today (Wednesday) that Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai has accepted an offer to sit on this year's Cannes jury. There has been widespread speculation recently that she has been offered a starring role in the next James Bond film.

Germans made nearly 60 million copies of movies on CDs last year, according to a survey by the Federal Film Board (FFA). As reported by Daily Variety, the survey concluded that 15.5 million copies were downloaded from the Internet.

Western and Arab reporters alike condemned the U.S. military Tuesday after a U.S. tank fired into a Baghdad hotel housing international journalists, killing a still photographer working for Reuters and a television cameraman working for the Spanish network Telecinco. The Pentagon said that the tank had responded to sniper fire. Moreover, it said, it had warned journalists repeatedly about the risks of covering the war. However, CNN's chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour maintained that no one in the hotel had been aware of sniper fire before the tank attack. But even if there had been, she said, "Is the response legitimately tank fire into a hotel that is known by everybody to house international journalists?" Other U.S. TV reporters expressed more restrained views, and CNN was quick to distance itself from its correspondent's remarks, saying that she was speaking for herself and not for the network. Fox News's foreign editor Brian Knoblock merely remarked, "That sort of thing can happen any time in a military situation." Earlier in the day, two bombs struck the Baghdad bureau of the Arab satellite news channel al-Jazeera, killing Tareq Ayyoub, a Jordanian correspondent, and another bomb hit the office of Abu Dhabi TV in the same residential area, although no one was injured there. In New York, the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that the military strikes "against known media locations in Baghdad ... violate the Geneva Conventions." It noted that both al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV provided the Pentagon with the specific coordinates of their Baghdad offices. The CPJ demanded an investigation. [A spokesman for al-Jazeera told the Wall Street Journal that after sending the information to the Pentagon, it received a reply saying that "the only way to ensure the safety of our people is to leave Iraq."] Reaction in the Arab press was predictably furious. Hussein Shobokshi, a commentator for the Saudi Arabian English-language daily Arab News, said: "The Americans are trying to silence journalists. ... They want to make this war acceptable by twisting facts." The newspaper quoted businessman Ahman Alkhereiji as saying, "To say that this is against everything we hear about American beliefs in freedom of speech is really an understatement. ... Abu Dhabi TV was surrounded by American tanks and Iraqi TV was taken off the air. This shows a desire not to let the other side of the story be shown to the world."

The return of The Bachelor turned out to be ABC's highest-rated entertainment show last week, but that wasn't saying a whole lot, given the fact that it placed 37th on the Nielsen list. (The only other ABC show to make the Nielsen top-40 list was Primetime Thursday, which featured an interview with Lisa Marie Presley. Although it was ranked #27 on the list, it trailed both NBC and CBS in its time period.) All of the networks, except Fox, saw a decrease in viewers from the same week a year ago as cable coverage of the war in Iraq drew many away. In particular, ratings for the NCAA basketball tournament on CBS fell nearly 37 percent from last year. Nevertheless, CBS won the week with an 8.0 rating and a 13 share. NBC was second with a 7.3/12, followed by Fox with a 5.6/9. ABC trailed with a dismal 4.9/8.

The top ten shows of the week according to Nielsen Research: 1. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CBS, 16.6/25; 2. Friends, NBC, 13.0/21; 3. American Idol (Tuesday), Fox, 12.6/19; 4. E.R., NBC, 12.4/20; 5. American Idol (Wednesday), Fox, 11.8/18; 5. Everybody Loves Raymond, CBS, 11.8/17; 7. Survivor: Amazon, CBS, 11.6/18; 8. CSI: Miami, CBS, 11.4/19; 9. Law & Order, NBC, 10.5/18; 10. Law & Order: SVU, NBC, 10.4/18.

Cable news coverage of the war in Iraq even cut the average ratings of the network newscasts last week, with CBS Evening News with Dan Rather falling 12 percent and World News Tonight with Peter Jennings declining 2 percent from a year ago. NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw saw an improvement, however, as it rose 5 percent from a year ago. The audience for Fox News Channel, which has strongly supported U.S. policy in Iraq, surged as much as 300 percent (although it remained about one-third the size of the broadcast networks' news audience). Meanwhile, market research firm CMR/TNS Media Intelligence reported Tuesday that TV networks lost $77 million in ad revenue during the first week of the war, when they dropped commercials.

Fox's American Idol once again dominated Tuesday night's ratings, scoring a 14.0/20 during the 8:00 p.m. hour, almost twice the numbers of CBS's JAG (7.2/11), which nabbed second place. NBC's two-hour Cher "farewell" special at 9:00 fared very well indeed, averaging an 11.8/17.

Analysts are predicting that the board of General Motors, which is meeting today, will approve Rupert Murdoch's $7-billion offer to buy a controlling stake in Hughes Electronics and its DirecTV satellite service. Under the proposed deal, Murdoch's News Corp, which has offered a premium of about 21 percent for the shares, will wind up with 35 percent of Hughes. Twenty percent would be owned by General Motors Pension Trust, while individual stock holders would own the remainder.