The box office posted solid results on Monday, the Martin Luther King Day holiday, with the top 12 movies recording $27 million in ticket sales, according to final figures released Tuesday by Media by Numbers. Paramount's Cloverfield led the pack with a gross of $6.09 million. It also set a record for the four-day holiday with a total of $46.1 million. It's three-day total of $40 million set a weekend record for January, erasing the previous record of $35 million set by Star Wars (Special Edition) in 1997. Paramount says that the total budget for Cloverfield was just $25 million, although it was assumed that the studio spent far more than that to promote it. In a successful effort at counter-programming, Fox's 27 Dresses came in second with $27.4 million for the holiday, $4.43 million of which was earned on Monday.

The top ten films over the four-day Martin Luther King Day holiday weekend, according to final figures compiled by Media by Numbers (figures in parentheses represent total gross to date): 1. Cloverfield, Paramount, $46,146,546, (New); 2. 27 Dresses, Fox, $27,442,040, (New); 3. The Bucket List, Warner Bros., $16,664,347, 5 Wks., $44,223,780; 4. Juno, Fox Searchlight, $11,966,082, 7 Wks., $87,092,615; 5. National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Disney, $9,606,326, 5 Wks., $199,489,171; 6. First Sunday, Sony Screen Gems, $9,504,908, 2 Wks., $30,170,510; 7. Alvin and the Chipmunks, Fox, $9,433,049, 6 Wks., $198,813,230; 8. Mad Money, Overture Films, $9,273,645, (New); 9. I Am Legend, Warner Bros., $5,905,443, 6 Wks., $248,482,867; 10. Atonement, Focus, $5,528,377, 7 Wks., $32,653,183.

The death of Heath Ledger on Tuesday is likely to pose a considerable marketing problem for Warner Bros., which is due to release the Batman movie The Dark Knight on July 18, in which Ledger plays The Joker. Daily Variety pointed out that one of the first posters to be released in advance of the film's opening shows Ledger as The Joker drawing a clown's smile on a mirror with lipstick and the words, "Why So Serious?" A studio insider told the trade publication: "The Joker character is dealing with chaos and life and death and a lot of dark themes. ... Everyone is going to interpret every line out of his mouth in a different way now." Meanwhile, original reports by New York police that Ledger died of a probable drug overdose were revised. An NYPD spokesman said late Tuesday that no illegal drugs were found in his apartment, although prescription sleeping pills were found near his bed. Meanwhile, Editor & Publisher commented today (Wednesday), "If you watched the story of Heath Ledger's death explode chaotically across the Internet, with facts, errors, inconsistencies and confusions flying every which way, you may have concluded that in the new digital media's race to break stories in minutes, accuracy has been left in the dust." It warned that while in the past, journalists had hours to vet and craft a story, reporting now often "unfolds in real time."

The Motion Picture Association of America has acknowledged that a study that it commissioned in 2005 -- that concluded that widespread illegal downloading of movies on college campuses was responsible for billions of dollars in losses -- was wrong. The study had claimed that students with access to high-speed Internet connections in college dorms were to blame for 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses from online pirating. However, on Tuesday, the MPAA admitted that it got the figure wrong because of "human error" and that it was more like 15 percent. But Mark Luker, vice president of Educause, told the Associated Press Tuesday that the study did not take into account the fact that 80 percent of college students live off campus. He figured that campus networks may be responsible for only 3 percent of illegal downloads. The industry's earlier figure, he maintained, was intended to show that if college campuses got tough on the issue of illegal downloads, "it would make a tremendous difference in the business of the motion picture industry." He said that the new figures show that campus action would "have only a small impact." For its part, the MPAA said Tuesday, "We take this error very seriously and have taken strong and immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report."

Police in Melbourne, Australia today (Wednesday) staged the country's biggest raid on DVD pirates, seizing more than 400,000 bootleg DVDs and confiscating 170 DVD recorders. Among the seized DVDs, were copies of three films currently playing in Australian theaters, American Gangster, I Am Legend, and Alvin and the Chipmunks. According to Australian news reports, the raids came about following complaints from neighbors of the homes where the DVDs were being manufactured.

Focus Features has shelled out $10 million at the Sundance Film Festival for the comedy Hamlet 2, starring Steve Coogan, about a high-school drama coach who attempts to save the school's theater department with a sequel to the Shakespeare play. The film reportedly cost $9 million to produce. Reports said that the deal represented one of the biggest sales in the history of the festival and that the figure was clearly the most paid for any film at this year's edition. Today's (Wednesday) Wall Street Journal said that an all-night bidding war broke out following enthusiastic audience reaction at the film's screening. Focus CEO James Schamus told the newspaper that ordinarily his company likes to make its own films and has not bought a film at Sundance in three years. However, he said, "When our senior team walked out of that screening, every single one of them believed that it was a film that we needed to have."

In an effort to revive negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the Writers Guild of America on Tuesday withdrew its demands to act as bargaining agents for writers of reality and animated films and TV shows. The AMPTP had said that it would not return to the negotiating table until the WGA's jurisdictional demands were removed. In a message to members of the WGA East, President Michael Winship wrote that the guild had agreed to remove the proposals in order to show its "commitment to bringing a speedy conclusion to negotiations." With those issues removed, formal talks between the two sides were expected to resume today (Wednesday). The WGA also announced Tuesday that it had decided not to picket the Grammy awards ceremonies, set for Feb. 10. There was no indication whether the guild would allow writers to provide material for the program, due to air live on CBS from Los Angeles. Typically the awards ceremony credits two writers. However, the WGA vowed that it would not make a similar concession to the Academy Awards telecast, scheduled for February 24. Speaking at a WGA rally Tuesday, Winship said, "Until the Writers Guild has a deal with the conglomerates -- the studios and networks -- our intention is to boycott the Oscars, to picket the Oscars and to ask our fellow union members at the Screen Actors Guild to boycott the Oscars."

Fox TV and the CW networks announced Tuesday that they have decided not to produce pilots of many proposed television programs under consideration. They also said that, as an additional cost-cutting measure, they would abandon numerous projects that had been in development. Several networks have already cut loose writers and producers who are not currently involved in programs that are already on the air.

Monday night's Democratic debate in advance of the South Carolina primary drew 4.9 million viewers to CNN, setting a record. Surprisingly a whopping 1.9 million of those viewers -- or 37 percent -- were adults 18-49 years old, the target demographic for television and cable networks. The debate topped the previous record of 4.4 million for the Republican presidential debate last November on YouTube. The two programs were the most-watched debates on cable since 1996.

A study conducted jointly by the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism has concluded that the news media gave "deferential and uncritical" coverage to hundreds of false administration statements about the national security threat from Iraq following the 9/11 attacks that "effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses." The study, posted Tuesday on the CPI's website and reported later by Editor and Publisher, tallied 935 false statements by Bush administration officials, including President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House spokesmen Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan. "The cumulative effect of these false statements -- amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts -- was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war," the study concluded.

Suggesting that being a 67-year-old former Beatle no longer carries the cachet that it once did, the producers of Live With Regis and Kelly on Tuesday refused to allow Ringo Starr to perform a song from his new album, Liverpool 8, unless he cut it to less than three minutes. Starr's publicist, Elizabeth Freund, told the Associated Press Tuesday that the drummer/singer walked out of the studio after the show's producers refused to compromise by cutting back the chat time on the program. A spokeswoman for Regis and Kelly said that Starr had been informed of the time requirement for the song when he was booked last November.

Fox's American Idol continued to dominate the ratings Tuesday night, posting a huge 16.7 rating and a 25 share. Nevertheless that was down 12 percent from the comparable second-week numbers a year ago when Idol posted a 19.0/28. Although a repeat, Fox's House kept the network in first place place at 9:00 p.m. with a 9.3/14. NBC took over first place at 10:00 p.m. (Fox does not air programs in the 10:00 p.m. hour) with NBC's Law and Order taking a commanding lead over its rivals with a 9.0/15.