Bruce Willis

The hit-man comedy "The Whole Nine Yards" held the top box-office spot for a second weekend with $9.6 million in ticket sales, according to industry estimates Sunday. The teen comedy "Snow Day" also held strong at No. 2 with $8.5 million in its third weekend. The only new movie to debut in the top five was "Reindeer Games," a casino-heist caper starring Ben Affleck, Gary Sinise and Charlize Theron and directed by John Frankenheimer.

His motto is "I'm very careful, I'm a dentist." So it's to be expected that the seven years since he moved from Chicago to Montreal haven't been terribly exciting for "The Whole Nine Yards' " Nicholas "Oz" Oseransky (Matthew Perry), a square-jawed underachiever so ineffectual he feels helpless when restaurants put mayonnaise all over his hamburger. Oz's new neighbor, Jimmy "The Tulip" Tudeski (Bruce Willis) also hates that local culinary custom.

As Bruce Willis and his entourage get set to step from their hotel, one of the crew peers out at the passersby on the street, then calls back, "He's got a gun!" There's some mock ducking, but everyone understands it's a goof, pure play, throwing out the line that's so obnoxiously de rigueur in the shoot-'em-ups that earn Willis $20 million a pop, plus juicy percentages, whenever he wants to do 'em. Lately he hasn't felt like it, though, and that's just the point, the rub of the joke.

For years, writer-director Alan Rudolph had wanted to film Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s "Breakfast of Champions," a dark, satirical comedy of middle-aged, Middle American angst, and Bruce Willis finally made his dream come true by signing on both as star and, in an uncredited role, executive producer. With Willis in place as Dwayne Hoover, the most successful car dealer in the Four Corners region of the U.S.

The worst part about reviewing video games is that there are so many of them. It's impossible to keep up. The holidays are the worst, as all the publicists in America--or so it seems--clamor to get their games reviewed before Christmas. Of course, that's also when store shelves are flooded with new titles for every platform.

Bruce Willis gets as much as $20 million to star in a mainstream studio movie, and lately he's starred in several: Disney's "Armageddon," Universal's "Mercury Rising" and 20th Century Fox's upcoming "The Siege," just to name this year's crop. So why would Willis appear in a quirky film for next to no money? Hollywood insiders are closely tracking the progress of just such a project: "Breakfast of Champions," the movie adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s 1973 novel. The project is Willis' baby.

Miniature plastic planets had been placed on Lucite pedestals in the middle of each table where the guests would dine. The acoustics in the temporary state-of-the-art theater had been checked and rechecked, and the stage where Aerosmith would perform had been strewn with jagged Styrofoam chunks to look like the surface of an asteroid. Here, at Monday night's world premiere of Touchstone Pictures' "Armageddon," the folks at Disney seemed to have thought of everything. Party crashers?

One of the most hyped movies of the summer is "Armageddon," a nonstop barrage of action and sci-fi opening Wednesday and starring Bruce Willis. The $140-million film's blockbuster status is considered a foregone conclusion in Hollywood--despite the fact that Willis' last three movies, "The Fifth Element," "The Jackal" and, most recently, "Mercury Rising," didn't exactly break domestic box-office records.

Imagine having a potential summer blockbuster movie coming out and the star of the film is a no-show at the gala premiere? Or he doesn't hit the talk-show circuit during the final week, either on "The Late Show With David Letterman" or "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno." Yet, that seems to be a real possibility this week for Disney as it prepares to launch its mega-hyped movie "Armageddon."