Final figures confirmed Monday that Paramount/DreamWorks' The Heartbreak Kid, which had been expected to win the box-office race hands-down, was thrown for a loss by the football-themed family movie The Game Plan. Heartbreak opened in second place with $14 million, while the second week of Game Plan remained in first with $16.6 million. The Jamie Foxx-starring thriller The Kingdom slipped to second place with $9.7 million. Two other new films tanked in their debuts. The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising opened in fifth place at $3.7 million, ahead of the dance flick Feel the Noise, which opened in eighth place with $3.1 million. Surprisingly Lionsgate's 3:10 to Yuma had the smallest drop of any film in wide release -- just 28 percent -- as it took in an additional $3.2 million in its fifth week and landed in seventh place. It has now earned $48.7 million, the highest gross for any film thus far in the fall season. In reporting on the Yuma results, Baltimore Sun movie writer Michael Sragow commented that they prove "that even in a lowest-common-denominator marketplace, talent, sometimes, will win out."

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. The Game Plan, Disney, $16,609,377, 2 Wks. ($43,158,823); 2. The Heartbreak Kid, Paramount, $14,022,105, (New); 3. The Kingdom, Universal, $9,722,940, 2 Wks. ($31,746,270); 4. Resident Evil: Extinction, Sony, $4,521,301, 3 Wks. ($43,695,477); 5. The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, 20th Century Fox, $3,745,315, (New); 6. Good Luck Chuck, Lions Gate, $3,657,516, 3 Wks. ($29,255,442); 7. 3:10 to Yuma, Lions Gate, $3,215,469, 5 Wks. ($48,728,753); 8. Feel the Noise, Sony, $3,187,153, (New); 9. Mr. Woodcock, New Line, $2,331,445, 4 Wks. ($22,613,590); 10. The Brave One, Warner Bros., $2,321,359, 4 Wks. ($34,380,387).

Shares in Movie Gallery, the second-largest home-video renter (behind Blockbuster), plummeted more than 40 percent to 26 cents Monday, following a report by the Wall Street Journal that the company would likely be compelled to file for bankruptcy this month. Shares had risen only $.017 cents by midday trading today (Tuesday). The company has been struggling under a heavy debt load since it acquired Hollywood Video for $1.1 billion in 2005. It is currently in the process of closing down hundreds of underperforming and unprofitable stores.

BitTorrent, the San Francisco company whose file-sharing technology has frequently been condemned by film studios and TV networks for "facilitating" Internet piracy, is expected to unveil today (Tuesday) a new system for streaming video over the Internet in high quality. The Delivery Network Accelerator will reportedly rely on users' computers essentially acting as multiple streaming servers, thereby cutting costs and making it possible for users to view videos over their entire computer monitors with quality approaching that of HDTV.

A spokesperson for United Artists said Monday that the company does not suspect sabotage in a film-lab accident that resulted in the destruction of footage shot in Germany for the Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie. According to reports, key scenes filmed at the Bendlerblock memorial in Berlin, where German officers involved in an assassination plot against Hitler were executed in 1944, were ruined by lab chemicals at the Arri Munich processing plant. Although they had initially dragged their feet in issuing permits for filming at the memorial -- presumably because of protests over Cruise's affiliation with Scientology -- German authorities promptly agreed to allow the memorial to be used a second time so that the scenes could be reshot.

U.K. exhibitor Cineworld, which has already converted 72 of its screens to digital projection, announced today that it will convert 30 of those screens to 3-D in time for the release of Warner Bros.' Beowulf on November 16. The company said that it will employ the REAL D 3-D system. Cineworld CEO Steve Wiener said in a statement that the deal "will revolutionize the cinema experience for our moviegoers across the country. ... The impact of 3-D on the film industry can be compared to the move from black and white to color."

Movie and TV producers are gearing for a probable strike by the Writers Guild of America on November 1, Daily Variety observed today (Tuesday). The trade publication quoted one unnamed studio executive as saying, "It's as hot as I've ever seen it. And whether or not they strike on November 1, we have to act as if they will." In an interview with Variety, WGA West President Patric Verrone said, "A strike on Nov. 1 is a real option." TV networks are likely to be hit first -- and hardest. "The nets are scrambling to figure out how they'll fill primetime with no new scripted shows," Variety commented. (For the past three weeks, NBC has not aired its Dateline magazine feature, the first time in its history that the show has been sidelined for so long. The network has traditionally used Dateline as a fill-in for failed shows but presumably is now stockpiling episodes for airing during a strike.)

ABC's Dancing With the Stars continued to dominate on Monday night, averaging a 12.8 rating and a 19 share between 8:00 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Many of the shows on other networks, however, saw significant ratings erosion. CBS's Two and a Half Men at 9:00 p.m. dropped to an 8.4/12, down 24 percent from the comparable Monday a year ago. Likewise, the network's CSI: Miami was down 18 percent to a 10.1/16. NBC's new comedy Chuck saw its ratings decline to a 4.9/7 following its debut two weeks earlier with a 6.4/10. The network's new Journeyman dropped to a 4.8/7, a 29-percent plunge from its opening week.

Associated Press Television News reported today (Tuesday) that the U.S. military in Iraq has returned footage seized by American soldiers last week from one of APTN's cameramen. The cameraman, Ayad M. Abd Ali, had been filming the aftermath of an insurgent attack against the Polish ambassador that left him critically injured. A.P. said that after his video was grabbed, Ali was handcuffed, blindfolded, and taken away in a Humvee. After being detained by U.S. troops for some 40 minutes, he was released, but his video was not returned. Initially a U.S. Army spokesman had cited an Iraqi law against taking photographs at the scene of insurgent attacks. He later denied, however, that the Army was enforcing Iraqi laws. Then on Monday the Army returned the tapes. A.P. attorney Dave Tomlin told the wire service that he was glad the video had been returned, "but it should never have been seized in the first place. ... We plan to ask for assurances that soldiers aren't actually being told to harass journalists and interfere with newsgathering."

While Katie Couric was still co-hosting the Today show, former NBC President Robert Wright forwarded a note to her from a viewer who complained that Couric had been "too confrontational" during her interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz has revealed in his new book, Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War, out today (Tuesday). "Couric felt that Wright must be telling her to back off" on the war in Iraq, Kurtz writes. "She wanted to believe that her NBC colleagues were partners in the search for truth, and no longer felt that was the case. She knew that the corporate management viewed her as an out-and-out liberal. When she ran into Jack Welch, the General Electric chairman, he would sometimes say that they had never seen eye to eye politically. If you weren't rah rah rah for the Bush administration, and the war, you were considered unpatriotic, even treasonous."

ABC World News anchor Charles Gibson told students at the University of Pennsylvania Monday that corporate bosses do not influence the content of his nightly newscast. "We're circumspect that our ownership is Disney," the student newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian quoted Gibson as saying. "We'll talk about a story if it affects them. But the sales division keeps their hands off." Commenting on the falling ratings for the rival CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, Gibson said that CBS's mistake was "trying to alter the form of the show."

The BBC is about to fire as many as 2,800 employees, representing more than 12 percent of its workforce, the London Financial Times reported today (Tuesday). Most of the cuts will hit the BBC's news, talk and documentary units, the financial newspaper said. BBC Director-General Mark Thompson is expected to present details of the retrenchment at a meeting of the BBC Trust on October 17. In March 2005, the BBC cut its staff by 3,700.