Moviegoers turned their backs on serious dramas -- particularly those based on current news -- and instead opted for vampires and comedies over the weekend. Although a record eight films opened over the weekend, only one earned more than $10 million -- Sony's vampire flick 30 Days of Night, which made it to the top with an estimated $16 million in ticket sales. In second place was last weekend's champ, Why Did I Get Married? with $12.1 million. In its third week, Disney's The Game Plan placed third with $8.1 million. Of the other new films, the Ben Affleck-directed Gone Baby Gone, which nabbed positive reviews for the actor-turned-director, fared best with $6 million. But Rendition, about a terrorist suspect arrested by the U.S. and sent to a foreign country to be tortured and questioned, grossed only $4.2 million. Commented today's (Monday) Wall Street Journal: "A glut of serious-minded Oscar contenders is crowding theaters with disastrous box-office results." And in an interview with the Associated Press, Paul Dergarabedian, head of Media By Numbers, added: "Fall is the season of the serious movie, and it seems like audiences in a way are resisting the serious movie right now."

The top ten films for the weekend, according to studio estimates compiled by Media by Numbers: 1. 30 Days of Night, $16 million; 2. Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married?, $12.1 million; 3. The Game Plan, $8.1 million; 4. Michael Clayton, $7.1 million; 5. Gone Baby Gone, $6 million; 6. The Comebacks, $5.85 million; 7. We Own the Night, $5.5 million; 8. Tim Burton's the Nightmare Before Christmas, $5.1 million; 9. Rendition, $4.2 million; 10. The Heartbreak Kid, $3.9 million.

Tyler Perry, whose Why Did I Get Married? has grossed nearly $40 million over the past ten days, defying industry predictions, now intends to disprove the notion that movies with black-oriented themes can not do business abroad, the Los Angeles Times observed today (Monday). Charles King, Perry's agent at the William Morris Agency, told the newspaper that Perry plans to challenge the status quo. "In the past, the studios used to say that movies about blacks or starring blacks wouldn't play outside of the South," he said. "That was a battle that was fought and won." However, the Times observed, Lionsgate, which owns worldwide rights to Married has revealed no plan for an international release. For that reason, Perry's production company is putting together an international strategy for its next film, Meet the Browns, due to be released domestically early next year.

Youth Without Youth, which marks Francis Ford Coppola's return to filmmaking after 10 years, received mixed critical reaction at the Rome Film Festival following its screening on Saturday. To those critics who urged Coppola to stick with doing what he does best, the director said at a news conference, "I think we should be tolerant of artists who want to break new ground, and not require them to make gangster films all their lives." Coppola also told reporters that his recent remarks about Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson were quoted out of context. (GQ magazine had published excerpts from an interview in which Coppola had reportedly said in effect that the three actors had become content to rake in riches and rest on their laurels.) "I have nothing but respect and admiration for them," he said at the Rome news conference. "These are the three greatest actors in the world today and they are my friends. So I have nothing but affection for them."

Negotiations between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers resumed today (Monday) following Friday's announcement that 90.3 percent of WGA members had voted to authorize a strike after the current contract expires on Oct. 31. However, WGA officials suggested that guild members were not likely to walk next week. "Writers do not want to strike, but they are resolute and prepared to take strong, united action to defend our interests," WGA West President Patric Verrone said in a statement. Nick Counter, president of the AMPTP, said, "We are not surprised with the outcome of this vote, given reports of how this election was conducted. Our focus is on negotiating a reasonable agreement with the WGA."

A one-two punch of football followed by baseball put Fox well ahead of its rivals in the Sunday night ratings race. An overrun of NFL coverage at 7:00 p.m. produced a 10.8 rating and an 18 share for Fox at 7:00 p.m., well ahead of CBS's usual winner of that time period, 60 Minutes, which registered only a 7.5/13. Fox retained the lead from 8:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. with an average 11.1/17 for the final game of the American League Championship Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians, edged out only in the 9:00 p.m. hour by ABC's Desperate Housewives, which scored an 11.3/16. (The game was won by the Red Sox, who overcame a three-game-to-one deficit.) Fox also took Saturday night with game six of the ALCS, averaging a 6.7/12, well ahead of second-place CBS, which recorded a 4.8/9.

NBC, which has had a contentious relationship with websites that have sought to present content from its shows, suddenly shut down its "channel" on YouTube over the weekend without notice, the tech gossip site Valleywag.com reported Sunday. NBC set up its official channel on the YouTube site only last June after it had expressed outrage that clips from Saturday Night Live were being posted on YouTube and attracting more viewers than the show itself. The network later became embroiled in a dispute with Apple over compensation for shows offered for download and streaming on the company's iTunes Store. NBC and News Corp's Fox Broadcasting recently formed their own online venture, Hulu, which is due to launch within the next week with content from both networks. Meanwhile News Corp-owned MySpace has begun airing Roommates, a kind of scripted reality series (each "webisode" is three minutes long) in which viewers will be asked to suggest how the story should progress.

SanDisk, the company best known as a manufacturer of flash memory cards, plans to offer a package that will allow users to download movies and TV shows onto what it calls the Sansa TakeTV Video Player and play them on standard television sets. According to an Associated Press report, the tiny device, which comes with a 4GB or an 8GB flashcard, also includes a downloading service called Fanfare, which at launch was reportedly offering only 85 titles from CBS and the network's cable sibling Showtime. Today's (Monday) Wall Street Journal observed that the SanDisk device will also play videos downloaded in formats commonly used to pirate movies and TV shows on the Internet. "While it said it doesn't approve of TakeTV being used with such content," the Journal noted, SanDisk "hasn't taken any technical measures to prevent it."

Cable giant Comcast is actively blocking file sharing services like BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella, the Associated Press reported on Friday. "When files are being exchanged between two computers, Comcast surreptitiously steps in and gets the two machines to hang up on each other," the wire service reported. While such tactics may interfere with downloading bootlegged movies, they also block legal use of the file-sharing services. "An independent producer distributing his own film, for example, is treated with the same regard as a pirate," A.P. said. While a Comcast spokesperson maintained that the cable company "does not block access to any applications," he would not define what he meant by "access." Meanwhile, today's (Monday) New York Post reported that the Motion Picture Assn. of America is talking to a number of Internet Service Providers about adopting technologies that would prevent their customers from illegally swapping movies and TV shows online.

Sixty percent of the entire British TV audience -- 15.8 million viewers -- tuned in to watch South Africa defeat England in the Rugby World Cup final Saturday night. ITV, which carried the game, said it was "the most-watched television moment of the year." The commercial channel also noted that the ratings figures represented only at-home viewing and did not take into account additional numbers of viewers in pubs and clubs.