The Paramount/DreamWorks alliance paid off again over the weekend as Disturbia took over the top spot at the box office with an estimated $23 million in ticket sales, far ahead of expectations. It reportedly cost $20 million to make, and analysts had predicted that it would earn about $12 million. The film sent Blades of Glory, also from Paramount/DreamWorks, sliding to second place with $14.1 million after holding the No. 1 position for the previous two weeks. The success of the film also answers the question of whether 20-year-old Shia LaBeouf has enough vowel recognition to open a film on his own. On Friday, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg announced that LaBeouf had been selected to co-star in the next Indiana Jones movie. Meanwhile, things went from bad to worse for The Weinstein Co.'s Grindhouse, which plummeted 62 percent to tenth place with just $4.2 million. It was also a bad weekend for a slew of new releases, including Perfect Stranger, starring Bruce Willis and Halle Berry, which finished fourth with $11.5 million, while 20th Century Fox's Pathfinder debuted in sixth place with $.8 million. Redline, starring Eddie Griffin, didn't even make the top ten as it opened with $4 million. Opening on only 877 screens, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters took in a respectable $3.1 million. Sales for the top 12 films were down 9.4 percent to $99.4 million, according to Media by Numbers. Overseas, Mr. Bean's Holiday, starring Rowan Atkinson, which was knocked out of the top spot on the overseas box office last week by 300, returned to the top spot this weekend as it added another $18 million to its gross, bringing it to $127 million.

The top ten films for the weekend, according to studio estimates compiled by Media by Numbers: 1. Disturbia, $23 million; 2. Blades of Glory, $14.1 million; 3. Meet the Robinsons, $12.1 million; 4. Perfect Stranger, $11.5 million; 5. Are We Done Yet?, $9.2 million; 6. Pathfinder, $4.8 million; 7. Wild Hogs, $4.6 million; 8. The Reaping, $4.6 million; 9. 300, $4.3 million; 10. Grindhouse, $4.2 million.

Complaints have begun appearing on some tech websites that copyright-protection coding on new releases from Sony, including Stranger Than Fiction, The Holiday, Casino Royale, and The Pursuit of Happyness, has made them unplayable on certain DVD players. One person complained on an Amazon.com discussion board that when inserted in Sony's DVP-CX995V player, the disks "load up to the splash title screen and then load no further, then after about 60 secs the player turns itself off!" The writer said that when he contacted Sony he was told that the company was aware of the problem and that it was working on a firmware update. The writer then asked Sony, "Would it not be a good idea to test changes you intend to make on your DVDs at least on your own equipment so that if you find a problem you could have the firmware update available instead of not only inconveniencing, but alienating your own customers?"

A 46-second scene of a plane crash that was deleted from the 2005 movie Sahara cost more than $2 million to shoot, according to accounting records of the movie obtained by the Los Angeles Times. In a rare glimpse at the line items of a movie budget, the newspaper on Sunday revealed that "courtesy payments," "gratuities" and "local bribes" totaling $237,386 were passed out in Morocco, where much of the movie was filmed. The newspaper said that a $40,688 payment to stop a river improvement project and $23,250 for "political/Mayoral support" may have been illegal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. A total of $3.8 million was paid to ten screenwriters. On the other hand, the documents revealed, local Moroccan crew members were paid piddling amounts. An assistant propman, for example, was paid $233 per week, about what a U.S. propman would have received for a single day.

Saying that copyright piracy "is getting worse, not better," NBC Universal general counsel Rick Cotton on Friday asked the White House to establish a Cabinet-level piracy czar to deal with the issue. Speaking to a meeting of the American Bar Association, Cotton said that losses due to copyright piracy have reached the billions of dollars. As reported by Daily Variety, he concluded his address by remarking, "Our future economic security deserves a priority comparable to efforts to protect our physical security." On Saturday, five days after the U.S. filed a piracy complaint against China with the World Trade Organization, the Chinese government publicly destroyed what it claimed were 42 million pieces of bootleg DVDs, CDs, computer software and illegal publications. In an interview with the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese official said, "Through the act of destruction, we wish to show to the world the firm determination of the Chinese Government in protecting intellectual property." Meanwhile the Associated Press reported today (Monday) that bootleggers in Malaysia who have had their stashes of disks confiscated are turning to pornography, some of it featuring underaged girls.

Barry Nelson, whose Everyman appearance allowed him to play a variety of characters in movies, on the stage and in TV shows during a career that spanned more than 65 years, died on April 7 at age 89, the Associated Press reported Sunday, citing his wife Nansi. Nelson was the first actor to play James Bond, appearing in a live TV adaptation of Casino Royale in 1954 for the CBS anthology series Climax -- eight years before Sean Connery first played the character in movies. A kinescope recording of the drama was discovered in 1981 and was later released on home video.

Don Imus said over the weekend that he may be down but definitely not out. In a statement to Newsweek magazine, Imus said, "I could go to work tomorrow. Bigger deal. More money. TV simulcast ... I've got a summer of kids to cowboy with and then we'll see." In typical Imus rhetoric, he insisted that he was "a good and decent person who made a mistake in the context of comedy," adding: "My strength comes from not being full of sh** and a coward." In an unusual ventilating of the affair, the NBC magazine Dateline presented interviews with several NBC News executives Sunday night, describing the behind-the-scenes wangling and wrangling that occurred after Imus's notorious comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team were posted on the liberal Media Matters for America website and later on YouTube. NBC News President Steve Capus said that when he was informed of the Imus clip, "I went through the roof. ... This jumped out unlike anything else he had ever said. And it became very clear that this was incredibly serious." Capus said that he regarded Imus's perfunctory apology the following day as "inadequate" -- a reaction shared by many others inside NBC news, especially by the network's leading black staffers who took part in a conference on Tuesday, Dateline indicated. The following day, Phil Griffin, a senior vice-president of NBC News, gave Imus the news. In an interview with Dateline correspondent Dennis Murphy, Griffin recalled, "I told him that we were gonna pull the plug and although Don laughed and he said, 'You know this is hard to take,' he said, 'I understand. I said the words. We wouldn't be here if I hadn't said those words.'"

Last Thursday -- a night NBC once called Must See TV night -- NBC recorded its lowest ratings during a regular season in its history, trade reports indicated today (Monday). Dreadful numbers for comedy shows My Name Is Earl, The Office, 30 Rock, and Scrubs, also pulled down the ratings for E.R., which attracted its smallest audience ever -- 9.24 million viewers compared with 14.49 million for CBS's Shark. On Saturday, the final two episodes of the NBC sitcom Andy Barker, P.I. attracted only 3.2 million viewers, one of the lowest ratings for any network television show during a regular season in history.

For the first time ABC anchor Charles Gibson has landed in the list of TV Week's ten most powerful TV news executives. Gibson placed third on the list, behind Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes and NBC News President Steve Capus. Neither NBC News anchor Brian Williams nor CBS anchor Katie Couric made the list.

Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels is critical of NBC's decision to yank clips from NBC shows off YouTube. "YouTube has been great for us," Michaels told the New York Observer, noting that it has made people all over the world aware of SNL. He added that he doesn't understand the deal NBC has struck with Fox that will make clips of their shows available to a number of websites. "It sounds cool, but it all seems like it's still shaking out," he remarked.

Toronto, which saw TV and film production drop 21 percent in 2006, will soon get a new 100,000-square-foot studio, courtesy of England's Pinewood Studios and Canadian developer Castlepoint, the Toronto Star reported Saturday. Announcement of the project comes at a critical time, when the Canadian dollar is rising against the U.S. dollar and when U.S. states are busy wooing film producers by passing legislation providing tax breaks to them. "It's phenomenal that you have a studio the caliber of Pinewood behind this, because it puts Toronto further on the radar map of global production companies," an unnamed source told the Star.

Don Ho, a fixture on the Honolulu nightclub scene and a frequent guest on TV variety shows in the '60s and '70s, died Sunday in Honolulu at the age of 76. He was best known for his theme song, "Tiny Bubbles," In 1976 and '77 he hosted The Don Ho Show on ABC.