Animated Movies

After the coffee. Before wondering how to get the journalistic equivalent of Joss Whedon's Marvel deal. The Skinny: Last night I saw "The Dark Knight Rises" for the second time, and while it's still a great movie - I'm an admitted Nolan fanatic - let's just say that the less time you spend thinking about the villain's plot, the better. Today I woke up to a smorgasbord of media news, with headlines including Liberty spinning off Starz, blockbuster Disney earnings, and details on Ron Meyer's slow fade.

By this weekend, DreamWorks' computer-animated "Shrek" is expected to surpass "The Mummy Returns" as the highest-grossing movie of 2001. There may be another film released this summer that takes in more money than "Shrek," which just passed $180 million in box office and is likely to end up taking in somewhere between $240 million and $250 million in the U.S., but there's little chance that one will be more profitable.

Four-year-old Brieanna Poteracke yanked hard on a rope dangling from the tower of a cathedral that had appeared overnight in The Oaks mall, about midway between Macy's and The Gap. Bells pealed in the 24-foot tower above her. A man in a purple mask and fake-fur goatee announced that a festival had begun, as a mob of children screamed their high-pitched approval.

"Ice Age: Continental Drift"will float to the top of the box office chart this weekend, as the animated 3-D sequel is expected to freeze out the competition. The fourth installment in the popular series featuring a group of prehistoric mammals will probably debut with a solid sum of $50 million to $55 million, according to those who have seen pre-release audience surveys. Twentieth Century Fox is predicting a softer domestic opening of $35 million to $40 million. Meanwhile,"The Amazing Spider-Man" - which has already pulled $160 million into its web - should maintain a solid hold during its second weekend in theaters.

Inside most animated movie studios, the workplace background noise is little more than gentle mouse clicks and the dull drone of computers. The sounds within Laika, the maker of the new stop-motion animated film "Coraline," are often distinctly different: the buzz of electric drills, the whir from sewing machines and the occasional wallop of a hammer. Animation has grown into not only a billion-dollar business but also a high-tech hotbed of visual effects.

On Wednesday, three Senate leaders condemned Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" for its "grossly inaccurate" portrayal of the events leading to the killing of Osama Bin Laden. But the controversy only seemed to make the well-reviewed picture even more appealing to moviegoers, who showed up in droves at theaters in New York and Los Angeles on the same day Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin  and John McCain publicly bashed the movie. Sony Pictures opened the CIA drama in five theaters Wednesday, collecting $124,828, according to the studio's estimate.

As the father of a teenage son with autism, I have coped with many challenges: finding the right school for a boy who can't sit still and has trouble connecting with peers; managing medications to help tame his anxiety and other symptoms; learning to negotiate endless one-sided conversations about my son's two obsessions - animated movies and animals. But those demands have never annoyed me in the way The Question does. Rarely does a week pass without someone asking me: "So what do you think?

China is rolling up the red carpet for Hollywood. Just six months after Chinese and American leaders reached a new agreement allowing more foreign movies into the world's most populous nation, officials there are trying to torpedo the box office returns of some of Hollywood's biggest summer films. American studios carefully schedule their pictures' launch dates - often declaring them a year or more in advance - to avoid colliding with similar movies going after similar audiences.

Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus and the gang are coming to the big screen, as 20th Century Fox Animation and its Blue Sky Studios unit announced Tuesday that they have acquired the rights to Charles M. Schulz's iconic "Peanuts" comic strip. The planned movie, the product of an agreement between the studio and Schulz's heirs, is scheduled to arrive in theaters Nov. 25, 2015. Steve Martino, who directed Fox's "Ice Age: Continental Drift" and "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who," is to direct from a screenplay by Craig Schulz, Bryan Schulz and Cornelius Uliano.