Ordinarily a film that grosses $49.1 million in its opening weekend is considered a probable moneymaker, but some box-office analysts are suggesting that the results for Rush Hour 3 are not only disappointing but probably point to an inevitable loss for Time Warner-owned New Line. They point out that the film cost more than $100 million (some suggest it cost as much as $150 million) to make and that as much as 40 percent of the gross has been promised to the two stars and the director -- including 20 percent that will go to Chris Tucker, 15 percent to Jackie Chan and 5 percent to director Brett Ratner. (The movie sold one-third fewer tickets than Rush Hour 2 did six years ago.) Meanwhile, last week's top film, The Bourne Ultimatum, slipped to second place in its second weekend with $32.9 million, while The Simpsons Movie moved to third place in its third weekend with $11.3 million. Three other films that opened over the weekend were outright flops. Paramount's Stardust, which reportedly soared way over budget to close to $200 million, earned just $9.2 million. Sony's Daddy Day Camp, which had initially been planned as a low-budget, straight-to-video release, earned just $3.4 million, while the horror film Skinwalkers took in a mighty skinny $753,520 (to come in at No. 17 on the list of top attractions).

The top ten films over the weekend, according to final figures compiled by Media by Numbers (figures in parentheses represent total gross to date): 1. Rush Hour 3, New Line, $49,100,158, (New); 2. The Bourne Ultimatum, Universal, $32,879,125, 2 Wks. ($131,552,425); 3. The Simpsons Movie, 20th Century Fox, $11,269,651, 3 Wks. ($152,381,993); 4. Stardust, Paramount, $9,169,779, (New); 5. Hairspray, New Line, $6,396,666, 4 Wks. ($92,139,670); 6. Underdog, Disney, $6,352,377, 2 Wks. ($24,643,289); 7. I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, Universal, $5,877,915, 4 Wks. ($103,777,170); 8. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Warner Bros., $5,432,130, 5 Wks. ($272,047,388); 9. No Reservations, Warner Bros., $3,855,029, 3 Wks. ($32,025,018); 10. Daddy Day Camp, Sony, $3,402,678, (New).

Disney is touting its November 6 Blu-ray DVD release of Pixar's Cars as the "High-Definition Event of the Year," with plans to include several "groundbreaking" interactive features on the disc. One of these will be a "Car Finder" game in which viewers "race the clock" to find one of 214 models of cars hidden throughout the movie. Other interactive features are described in a trailer posted online at http://disney.go.com/disneyvideos/bluray. In a picture-in-picture feature called "Cine-Explore," director John Lasseter acts as a guide, describing how scenes of the movie were made while viewers watch them.

Leonardo DiCaprio says he has found "the secret" to turning away the paparazzi and staying out of the tabloids: make a documentary about global warming. In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, DiCaprio, whose documentary, The 11th Hour, is scheduled to open on August 24, remarked, "The tabloids and the paparazzi don't care what I have to say about global warming or getting away from dependency on fossil fuels. ... I think I've just bored them into leaving me alone."

A group of filmmakers in Manchester, England say that want to turn Britain's second-largest city into "a whole little Hollywood." According to the Manchester Evening News, the group, calling themselves Not a Number, is attempting to raise $1.8 million from local investors to produce a commercial horror flick titled Splintered. Any investor putting $100,000 into it will automatically be invited to appear in the film as an extra. "We want to prove that you can raise funds to support new films here ... and that you don't have to go to America," Not A Number co-founder Rachel Richardson-Jones told the newspaper. Splintered was selected as the company's first production, she said, inasmuch as "we have identified that the horror genre works on lower budgets and is potentially profitable while also currently popular with audiences." Richardson-Jones emphasized that she views the project as a business, not art. "One of the problems with film production in the U.K. is that it has been perceived as high-risk, because investors think it will all revolve around an artistic, expressive director. But I'm a businessperson and a shareholder, and I want these films to make money. I've left a full-time job for this. [Splintered is] a good story, it will sell well, and I believe in it."

It was one thing for the character played by Joseph R. Gannascoli to be beaten to death with pool cues and sodomized with one on The Sopranos after the mob learned he was gay; it was quite another for Gannascoli to endorse a Rockwell Billiards pool cue inscribed with the phrase "A Cue to Die For," the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation protested Monday. "It's highly inappropriate that what served as a very real example of the hateful violence the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community faces is now being used as a gimmick to sell a product," GLAAD President Neil G. Giuliano said in a statement. "The insensitive inclusion of the pool cue in the 'To Die For' marketing theme betrays the legacy of The Sopranos character and is unacceptable." GLAAD is demanding that the words "A Cue to Die For" be removed from the product and that Rockwell Billiards and Gannascoli "apologize for using such a vulgar symbol of violence and anti-gay bigotry to make a profit."

Fans actually attending some National Football League games next season will be able to access most of the game information that they would get if they were watching the game on TV at home, thanks to a deal signed Monday between Montreal-based Kangaroo Media, DirecTV, and the NFL. Broadcasting & Cable reported Monday on its website that ticket holders attending games at the stadium homes of the Seattle Seahawks, the Houston Texans, the Miami Dolphins and the Washington Redskins will be able to rent hand-held devices that will allow them to watch live statistics, the CBS and Fox pre-game shows, and access information about any game in the NFL currently being played. The device is expected to rent for $24.95 for a single game and $119.95 for season-ticket holders. The devices had been tested last season in Miami and Washington D.C.

It hardly seems like the sort of fare you'd generally find on what was once called The Learning Channel and is now referred to simply as TLC, but the Discovery-owned channel announced Monday that it has purchased the rights to televise the Miss America pageant for the next three years. The pageant had seen its ratings plummet on broadcast television and was passed on to cable TV after the 2004 show drew a record-low 9.8 million viewers. But Viacom's CMT was even less successful in attracting viewers -- fewer than 3 million tuned in last year -- and decided not to exercise its rights to continue running it. In 1960 the Miss America Pageant drew 85 million viewers.

Eighty-two-year-old John Rigas, once among the most powerful cable-TV executives in the country, and his son Timothy, 51, entered a North Carolina federal prison Monday to begin serving 15-year and 20-year sentences respectively for securities and bank fraud that brought down Adelphia Communications, the cable system that the elder Rigas founded. Federal investigators had concluded that the Rigases had used Adelphia as their own "personal bank account" to loot it of hundreds of millions of dollars that they used for such things as flying two Christmas trees to New York at a cost of $6,000.

In the past few years newspaper sportswriters have made a steady migration to cable television, Washington Post sports columnist Norman Chad commented Monday. "We've gone from minor nuisance to cultural menace," he wrote, adding that all over cable and talk radio "there are sports journalists blabbing, gabbing, fretting, chatting, arguing, debating and, mostly, shouting. ... We used to just write, eat and drink; now we just talk, eat and drink. Who has time to write?" It's all become a great boon for the sportswriters, Chad observed. "If ESPN got out of the sports business tomorrow, half of America's top sports columnists would have to send their children back to public schools." Chad concluded: "If I had more time, I'd figure out a better way to express myself and end this column properly, but I have to go commentate on an ESPN World Series of Poker telecast."

American Idol has proved to be less of a hit off Broadway than it was on television. Idol: The Musical closed one day after it opened "due to a lack of advance ticket sales, a lack of positive feedback from audience members and critics and a lack of sustainable financial resources," producer Todd Ellis said in a statement. The musical, which satirized the TV show and its fans, had begun preview performances on July 5 with a cast that was unceremoniously dumped a few weeks later and replaced without explanation.