Throw them a party and they will come.  Or at least a reception with good food and drink. That seems to be the case with the increasingly strong turnouts of Academy members at screenings this season. As with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and other groups studios are discovering a shrimp cocktail can be a…

Jason James Murphy served a five-year prison term for kidnapping and abusing an 8-year-old boy near Seattle, but has been working for a decade as Jason James hiring kids as a casting assistant for productions including Super 8, Bad News Bears, The School Of Rock, Cheaper By The Dozen 2, and the upcoming film The Three…

It looks like Paramount will be the first major studio to take its “For Your Consideration” screeners online, announcing today a deal with Deluxe Entertainment Services Group that will provide streams of its awards-season offerings including Rango, Super 8 and Like Crazy. The Visual Effects Society will be the first…

In a bizarre development that I can only imagine will be very embarrassing to Sirius XM’s morning man Howard Stern, a bootlegged copy of the JJ Abrams-directed Super 8 has shown up on content-thieving websites. The print is watermarked with the Paramount Pictures logo, and “H Stern” in the right-hand corner. Film…

Thanks to the bounty from such films as Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Super 8, Thor, Rango and Kung Fu Panda 2, Paramount confirmed today that it has crossed the $1 billion mark at the domestic box office for the year. It is the first studio to surpass the milestone — the fifth consecutive year it’s been first. From…

SATURDAY PM/SUNDAY AM, 5TH UPDATE: After last weekend’s disappointing outcome for Green Lantern, Summer 2011 returns with big-time North American grosses. But both Disney’s Cars 2 and Sony’s Bad Teacher cooled off Saturday after a hot Friday. Expect an overall moviegoing total of $176M, up +6% from last year. Here’s…

EXCLUSIVE: There has been no internal announcement at WME about this. And the feeding frenzy has already started, with manager David Lonner’s phone ringing off the hook with calls from every major agency within minutes of Deadline first scooping the news. Because we’ve learned that Super 8 director JJ Abrams is taking…

Paramount Pictures announced today that the studio has passed the $1 billion mark for the calendar year at the international box office, reaching the milestone on Friday with the debut of Super 8 — that’s four days sooner than last year’s record-setting pace. It’s the fifth year in a row that Paramount Pictures Interna…

FX is expanding its collection of box-office hits with the acquisition of J.J. Abrams/Steven Spielberg’s Super 8, which opened at No. 1 this past weekend with $36.4 million. The Bad Robot/Amblin/Paramount movie joins the two previous No. 1 box-office openers — X-Men: First Class and The Hangover Part II, which were…

If you thought everyone was glued to the tube watching last night’s NBA Finals, you were right. LeBron fans (or foes) took a big bite out of Sunday night’s North American box office numbers. TV ratings were 50% higher than last year, affecting the male-skewing films in the evening like Super 8 ($9.3M), X-Men: First Cla…

Super 8's $37 million opening weekend was a surprise given last week’s soft tracking numbers that rival marketing execs attributed to JJ Abrams' insistence on keeping plot reveals — and the creature — out of the TV spots. Those skeptics might argue Super 8 could have posted a larger opening weekend with a more…

Insiders at Paramount said days ago there would be no divulging the creature in Super 8 before Friday, but that was before they pushed up the release one day. Today, director JJ Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg have leaked online what appears to be an industrial film that explains the creature. Part of this shows…