Couples Retreat

Estimated sales in the U.S. and Canada: Movie (studio) 3-day gross (millions) Percentage change from last weekend Total (millions) Days in release 1 2012 (Sony) $65 NA $65 3 2 A Christmas Carol (Disney) $22.3 -26% $63.3 10 3 The Men Who Stare at Goats (Overture/BBC/ Winchester Capital)

SERIES Being Human: The truth about the vampire massacre comes out in this new episode of the supernatural drama (6 and 9 p.m. BBC America). Celebrity Ghost Stories: 1980s pop star Debbie Gibson is featured in this new installment of the spooky series (6 and 10 p.m. Biography). Dogs 101: This canine-centric series returns with new episodes (8 p.m. Animal Planet). America's Most Wanted: America Fights Back: The true crime series hosted by John Walsh marks the ninth anniversary of the Sept.

Here's what filmmaker Tyler Perry does well: features characters not traditionally seen in movies. Here's where he could use help: toning down grossly over-the-top dramatics. In "Why Did I Get Married?" he tackles the all-too-familiar terrain of the ups and downs of matrimony, introducing us to eight married friends (he plays one of them) who met while they were undergraduates at a historically black college.

Snow jumps to NBC ABC News anchor Kate Snow is defecting to NBC News, where she will be a correspondent for "Dateline," NBC announced Friday. Since 2004, Snow has co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's "Good Morning America," a position viewed as a steppingstone to an assignment on the weekday edition of the morning show. But when "GMA" configured its team late last year after the departure of Diane Sawyer, the job of news anchor went to Juju Chang. "She's the whole package," "Dateline" executive producer David Corvo said of Snow in a statement.

THE Willard InterContinental, a historic hotel near the White House that has hosted power brokers for decades, is making a pitch for vacationers to Washington. Under the tutelage of its new French general manager, Herve Houdre, a veteran of the tony Hotel de Crillon and Hotel Plaza Athenee in Paris, the Willard has opened a sidewalk cafe on Pennsylvania Avenue, put up a history gallery and started serving afternoon tea.

It was evident from the moment Reg Rogers stepped onstage in "Measure for Measure" in Central Park this summer that he wasn't your typical Shakespearean actor. As the acid-tongued Lucio in the Bard's comedy, Rogers quipped, cast a wry eye and generally instigated a kind of gleeful mayhem, channeling what seemed to be both a wisecracking Dudley Moore and Johnny Depp as directed by Tim Burton. In both "Measure" and the alternating production "All's Well That Ends Well," in which Rogers played the equally ethically challenged Parolles, he had the audience at New York's Shakespeare in the Park in stitches with his dark, even nihilistic humor.

Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey had an unusual message for an industry in which taking credit for the latest hit is standard practice. "Evidently we have a situation where you put one foot in front of the other every day at the studio," he said on a conference call with his senior executive team Sunday. "We all work very hard, and every once in a while you find yourself bumping over a miracle." Whatever savvy went into distribution and marketing -- and there was certainly plenty of it -- Paramount indeed has a miracle on its hands with "Paranormal Activity," a movie produced for $15,000 and acquired for $300,000 that vanquished four new pictures with combined production budgets of more than $155 million to finish No. 1 at the box office this weekend.

You never see him at any fancy movie premieres or making the rounds of the talent agencies. He hasn't turned up on any Hollywood power lists. But the 68-year-old Ed Mintz has quietly emerged as a key player in the movie business over the past year, thanks to the growing popularity of CinemaScore, his Las Vegas-based market research company that provides an invaluable piece of information to studio insiders every Friday night. His reports reveal just how much -- or little -- moviegoers liked the new movies that invade America's multiplexes each weekend.