As a whole, Christmas weekend be breakin’ box office records, son:

• Biggest Friday through Sunday gross ever
• Biggest Christmas box office ever
• Most tickets ever sold in a three-day period (37.3 million)
• First weekend that three separate movies grossed more than $50 million each.

Sadly, one of those three movies was Alvin & the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.   Nonetheless, Hollywood studio execs are calling this windfall the best Christmas present ever, despite them all of them being Jews.  Other facty things:

• Avatar fell only 2.6% from its opening weekend, which is impressive considering a 40-60% drop is standard for Blockbusters these days (though it should be noted that three other movies did more business than last week)
• Sherlock Holmes set a record for a Christmas-Day opening with $24.9 million
• Alvin & the Chipmunks audiences were mostly families and “heavily Latino.”  I thought that was kind of funny because I didn’t know they even kept track of that stuff.  They don’t ask when you buy a ticket, do they?  Maybe they just take the number of stabbings and extrapolate.  *whacks piñata*
• Nine bombed.  It earned about $5.5 million in almost 1500 theaters.  Weinstein is pulling it from the Midwest to focus advertising on the coasts.  The Weinstein Company was already in financial trouble and Nine cost them $64 million.  Which is a lot to pay for what appears to be the world’s longest perfume commercial.  Toldja, dudes, next time go with the hooker yacht.  If there’s better investment than a hooker yacht, I don’t know what it is.

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Here’s Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law at the London premiere of Sherlock Holmes.   It’s a good visual illustration of why people love Robert Downey Jr. and hate Jude Law.  Dude, is that a silk polka dot scarf knotted around your neck?  David Carradine just got a boner in his grave.

[Source]

So Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movie has a poster now.  Here it is.  Tagline: “Holmes for the holiday.”  Ha, get it?  It’s cute ’cause it’s stupid, like a dog that falls down.  Speaking of dogs, I would hug the sh-t out of that bulldog up there.

[via Cinematical]

This new, longer trailer for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes showed up on YouTube this morning, but there’s nothing I hate more than a YouTube video with the embedding disabled, so I waited for someone else to rip it and now I’m using that.  Oh I’m sorry, was I boring you with details? God forbid you actually take an interest in how my day was.

I thought the old cut of the trailer looked more promising, where Robert Downey takes a puff on his pipe and immediately jumps out of a window.  In this one, they show him running across the room and commando rolling first, and it seems less goofy and slapstick and more “serious action movie.”  But aside from that, and the generic-action-epic music, it still looks mostly comedic.  Which is the right direction when you’re dealing with Robert Downey Jr. beating people up with a cane.  I remain cautiously optimistic.  But I swear to God the first person to call it a “bromance” movie is getting punched in the throat.

(The first rule of gay fight club?  You don’t even wanna know, dude.)

Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, comes out Christmas Day.  I’m cautiously optimistic — it could be good, or it could be sort of meh, like Guy Ritchie’s body of work since Snatch.  But that’s the thing about Hollywood: they don’t even wait for the goose to lay the golden egg before they start pumping it full of hormones and jamming a shoehorn up its ass* nowadays.

Three months ahead of the release of its Robert Downey Jr. action pic, Warners is developing a new installment. The studio is poised to bring on Kieran and Michele Mulroney, the scribes who are penning its “Justice League: Mortal” [barf] tentpole, to pen a draft of the new tale. Brad Pitt has had discussions with producers to star as Holmes’ nemesis Moriarty in the new pic, say people familiar with the project, though there is no deal in place for him to take the part.

Guy Ritchie helms the pic, and Downey stars as the title character; Jude Law plays protege Watson, and Rachel McAdams stars as love interest Irene Adler. Much of the talent is expected to return in the new pic, as could Ritchie as director. [THR]

“Is expected…”  “Could return” — these are the key words.  Basically, the studio thinks Sherlock Holmes is going to do well, so they want to make sequel.  But getting the cast and director locked down is a complicated process with lots of negotiation about salary and scheduling and stuff.  So they’re starting the process early, by paying two guys who had nothing to do with the original script a lot of money to write a script for the sequel, which they’re probably going to throw out and re-write as soon as Ritchie and the rest are locked down and they bring in writers they like.  But as they say in Hollywood, you gotta piss money down the toilet for no reason to make money.

*a butthorn?