Box Office - 'Toy Story 3' Biggest Pixar Opening Ever

The Sunday box office numbers are just estimates, so this could shift, but Toy Story 3 started the weekend with a heavy $41 million but couldn't keep that kind of momentum, even including Father's Day, which you'd think would be a boon for an excellent family film.

Box Office Mojo's figures read as follows: $41 million, $37 million, $31 million. So, $109 million total. That's a very strong start but not a record for an animated film. And those are decent holds on Saturday and especially Sunday, but both numbers are a lot lower than I would have expected, given Friday's start and the modus operandi for movie like this, which hit their peak on day two during a traditional three-day weekend. Not so here, and now I've got to do some cipherin'. I was operating under the assumption that $41 million in one day meant $115 million or more for three, and that would probably mean $200 million in ten days. That seems harder to accomplish now, but a $50 million second weekend would probably still sew that up. Also, if the film ages like it should - meaning better than Shrek and How to Train Your Dragon, and with a better first heat - it could still surpass Iron Man 2, which has stalled at just over $300 million.

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Box Office - Massive Start for 'Toy Story 3'

Toy Story 3 might not get the top weekend of 2010, but it could be the top movie of the year. A $41 million opening day, which should indicate at least $50 million on Saturday and a weekend number north of $115 million, is the first step for a film that now seems destined to get to the summer movie milestone of $300 million in a hurry.

Pixar movies always hold up, a combination of their incredibly wide appeal and repeat viewing. In general, anything that does more than a multiplier of three - meaning it earns more than three times its opening weekend number over its theatrical run - is a pretty successful release. Every Pixar movie has done that, so we're comfortable assuming this movie should nearly triple this weekend's performance. I won't go all in and declare that it's making $345 million or more, just because this weekend is so much bigger than expectations, but the odds are in its favor. Being the best of the summer movies helps, too. Iron Man 2 got off to a similarly large start, but couldn't hold up (it won't hit a multiplier of three, for instance), and Shrek Forever After started soft but has held up over the last month. This movie should combine the best of both of those examples, hitting $200 million in about another week or so.

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Movie Review - 'Jonah Hex'

Jonah Hex Starring Josh Brolin, John Malkovich, and Megan Fox Directed by Jimmy Hayward Rated PG-13

A man gruesomely marked by the brand of the butcher who murdered his family believes his quest for revenge will come up empty when he learns his nemesis has died in a hotel fire. So what is left for this man? Where does he go? Jonah Hex is a comic book adaptation that, in a longer format, could actually dig deeper and try to answer some of those questions. Of course, the concern isn't about the frayed emotions of a man who has lost everything and is reminded by his half-paralyzed and grotesque face. Jonah Hex is about 'splosions. At least we get that much. For a movie this size - a large budget, big stars, and a big studio - Hex is criminally short. It runs less than 80 minutes, credits to credits, so that's not worth the ticket price. But why is it so short? It appears that director Jimmy Hayward has tried very hard to cut down the film to under an hour-and-a-half, and some of those experiments work. He flies through the early stages of the story with narration supplied by Hex (Josh Brolin), and that's always a sure sign that someone somewhere thought the movie needed to be shorter. Tipping its cap to the film's roots, Hayward, who also directed the very different Horton Hears a Who, bakes in an animated sequence to explain how Hex went from wearing the brand of Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) to learning about Turnbull's death years later. It's another device that seems out of place, although it might have been the most memorable sequence in the entire film. There's also the more subtle approach Hayward uses: Outside of fights, the scenes here are very short, the dialogue very direct and brief. Stylistic choice? There doesn't seem to be much style at all in the way the story unfolds, so this is probably just an incomplete script. Feels like it. Again, there's zero emotional turmoil once Hex gets branded. Even when he finds out Turnbull is really alive, which we know will lead to him exacting revenge at the end, it's an incredibly short change of color on the mood ring. The real curse of Jonah Hex is that well over half the film feels nondescript. Even though it's kind of a western on steroids set in the years immediately following the Civil War, only rarely does it evoke its period. It lacks an authenticity, which could be because it lacks so much of everything else. Some of the set pieces are nice enough, but there's not even any consistency between them. The Washington D.C. created for the end of the film smacks of rushed CGI, which is fine if the rest of the movie does, too. Otherwise, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

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Fearless Forecast - Families Flock to 'Toy Story 3'

This summer has been a tough one to figure out. Almost nothing has performed as well as expected, and while it's easy to say the box office is down, we're still only three months removed from Alice in Wonderland, which has gone on to become the fifth-biggest movie ever worldwide, making a billion dollars faster than anything not named Avatar.

Will Toy Story 3 be like Shrek Forever After and kind of softball the opening weekend but hang around for a long time or will family audiences eat it up like The Karate Kid? I'm guessing the latter, and in huge numbers. Toy Story may emerge as the best reviewed film of the summer and maybe the year, which is slightly different from being the best movie all year; it just means there won't be many bad reviews. That always seems to be the case with Pixar, and it's one of the very few movie brands in the world that sells tickets based on its name. That's because Pixar doesn't falter, and even when they did, Cars wasn't that bad. Plus, the name Toy Story is about as good as it gets. Fans from 8 - 80. So I look for it to be pretty stout, especially with the 3-D ticket prices, which are actually justifiable here as opposed to last summer's Up.

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Megan Fox Updates Comic Book Movie 'Fathom'

A rough go for Megan Fox lately, although I'm sure nobody has sympathy for her. But losing Transformers so publicly and suddenly is at the least very embarrassing and it could have career repurcussions if there's more to it than weight issues (which there almost certainly had to be, based on her replacement).

She has Jonah Hex in theaters this weekend, but her last movie was Jennifer's Body, which didn't do much and Fox took the heat for most of that, which really wasn't accurate. But if Hex tanks, more talk of MegaFox fading is sure to start. One project Fox has been pursuing is Fathom, a comic book adaptation that the actress was linked to initially back in March 2009. "They're still working on the script and getting that together," she tells MTV. "That's in the early fetal pre-production stages."

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