Ashley Greene of New Moon Fuels 2-Part Breaking Dawn Rumorby Larson Hill

Although New Moon fever continues to sweep the globe in its second Twilight week at the box office, the promo push for New Moon was in full force in the days leading up to the Twilight Saga sequel, as Ashley Greene also did her part to help put New Moon over the top.

With New Moon still atop the box office, Entertainment Weekly sat down with Twilight Saga actress Ashley Greene days before the release of New Moon to see what the Twilight vampire had to say about New Moon. In the EW interview, Ashley Greene revealed that her closest friend in the New Moon cast is Kellan Lutz, who Greene says was a friend for five years before the Twilight Saga craze. with New Moon surprising everyone at the box office, Ashley Greene also mentioned that the Twilight fan response to New Moon has greatly increased since Greene did press for Twilight.

Looking ahead to the remaining Twilight Saga films beyond New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, EW asked Ashley Greene who she would like to see direct Breaking Dawn. Interestingly, unlike responses to the same Twilight question from Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner, Ashley Greene would like to see a new spin. “I just went to MoMA [NYC's Museum of Modern Art] and they were honoring Tim Burton, and I saw a whole compilation of his films and artwork and I just think hes an extraordinary artist. I think itd be really cool to have his spin on it, because its a very odd book, theres some very weird moments. he would actually put a really weird and cool twist on it.”

However, the most significant Twilight Saga comment from Ashley Greene about Breaking Dawn speaks to the rumors of Breaking Dawn being split into two parts. “And if we could do it the right way,” Greene told Entertainment Weekly, “itd be great to have two films. you definitely want to get all the important parts in there and you know how hardcore and passionate the fans are about it, so one might be difficult and there would be something left out. so if we could do it right, itd be great to have two films.”

Tell us what you think. will Breaking Dawn be split into two parts?

For the full interview with Ashley Greene of New Moon, head this way to EW.

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Kimberley French

Every time you kiss her, fake a seizure.

When I was a teenager, I devoted a lot of energy to trying to figure out what teenage girls wanted.

I paid close attention, so as to figure out what to say, how to act and what to buy — what kind of sneakers, jeans, jacket … I even contemplated belt width. one year belts were thick, the next year they were skinny, and if you wore the wrong kind, it meant you didn’t get the memo. you know, the Cool Memo, the one that every cool person gets telepathically and, apparently, simultaneously.

In fathoming such mysteries, teenage boys of my generation were left to fend for ourselves — not like the kids today. No, the boys today have it easy because they have The Twilight Saga: new Moon.

The other day, I sat in a theater full of preteen and teenage girls (some women, too), who screamed with rapture at every ridiculous thing two goofball teenage guys said. at first I thought, “This is cute.” then I realized this is the empirical data I could have really used when I was 15.

So hearken to me, young men. Study New Moon, and you will know truths that eluded Freud (sort of). you will know the rules. you will know what teenage girls want, and you won’t need the Cool Memo. Here are seven bits of wisdom you might glean:

Rule 1: Keep your compliments outlandish. “You have beautiful eyes” just isn’t going to cut it. but as New Moon shows, if you say, “You give me everything by breathing” and keep a straight face, you stand a chance of being perceived as sincere.

Rule 2: Compliment style is important. if you give compliments as though you hope to be complimented in return, you will get nowhere. but as New Moon illustrates, if you compliment the girl with the assumption that her amazing awesomeness is simply a law of the universe, your remarks will not only be well received, she will also admire your perception and discernment.

Rule 3: In developing your look, borrow from the classics. Edward could have been just another James Dean wannabe, but he jazzes up his look with a touch of whiteface: Brooding young man meets Marcel Marceau. Original.

Rule 4:Get in shape, today. There’s no getting around it. the respect that Jacob is getting these days is the result of getting seriously pumped up between movies. In New Moon, he comes close to doing the impossible — he almost takes Bella’s mind off Marcel Marceau. That’s right — he almost puts that mime in a box he can’t get out of. Jacob doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together, so it’s not his scintillating conversation. It’s the muscles.

Rule 5: Cultivate an aura of turbulence. When I was in high school, the boy who did best with girls was a guy who was a mix of tough and nutty, with a few phobias, including hypochondria. the one thing he wasn’t nervous about was girls. This kid was so preoccupied with phantom concerns that it never occurred to him to be nervous about the one thing every other guy was nervous about. This gave him an aura and made him into a problem to be solved … kind of like Edward. In New Moon, every other boy in the school is worried over how to ask out Bella. Edward is worried about death in life, a guarantee of damnation and the distinct possibility that at any moment he might rip open someone’s neck. This gives him an extra something, despite having a complexion slightly paler than Munch’s The Scream.

Rule 6: Keep saying, “I will protect you.” if you see New Moon, you will notice that everyone wants to protect Bella. you will also notice that every time someone announces that he will protect Bella, the girls in the audience scream and Bella looks pleased (in an introspective sort of way). So if you’re a teenage boy, you might want to throw “I will protect you” into conversations, apropos of nothing. just toss it into the mix and see how it goes over. Can’t hurt.

Rule 7: Every time you kiss her, fake a seizure. With most guys, when they kiss a girl for the first time, they want to seem as if they know what they’re doing. even if they feel as if they might have a seizure, they don’t show it … and that’s where they go wrong. Case in point: Edward in New Moon. Every time Edward kisses Bella, he starts moaning and fretting like James Cagney in White Heat. he looks as if he is about to go into an apoplectic shock — and instead of laughing at him, Bella thinks he’s great. who knew this could work?

Perhaps Edward knows this because he has tried it before. After all, he has been a teenager for approximately 96 years. his whole shtick might be a scam, the result of decades of intensive study, years of trial and error at high schools all over the world.

Most of us have just four years to get high school right. This guy has had a century.

mlasalle@sfchronicle.com

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – “The Twilight Saga: new Moon” took the no. 1 spot on the foreign circuit for a second consecutive weekend, grossing an estimated $85.1 million from 8,476 sites in 56 markets.

Offshore box office for the teen favourite based on Stephenie Meyer’s novel and co-starring Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart held up surprisingly well from its first-place opening round, dropping a relatively benign 31 percent. The film’s total offshore gross is $243 million.

Box-office action for director Roland Emmerich’s “2012″ dropped by more than 40 percent compared with the previous weekend, for a tally of $61.6 million from 12,090 screens in 107 markets. Since it opened offshore November 11, the disaster movie has grossed $455.8 million on the foreign circuit. “2012″ drew especially well in Asia, taking the no. 1 spots in such key markets as China, Japan and Korea.

Disney’s “A Christmas Carol” opened in seven markets, grossing $20.4 million from 5,328 sites in 48 territories. Holdover markets proved strong, providing $15.3 million of the weekend total, down a mild-mannered 28 percent from the previous frame. The motion-capture feature’s foreign total stands at $90.8 million.

“Paranormal Activity,” director Oren Peli’s super-low-budget horror thriller and domestic box-office phenomenon, opened in the U.K. (finishing no. 2 in the market with an estimated $4 million from 395 sites) as well as in Spain and South Korea. It tallied an overall weekend box office of $7 million from about 1,000 screens.

Disney unveiled the family comedy “Old Dogs” in Mexico and South Africa day-and-date with its domestic premiere. The opening tally from both markets was $1 million, with Mexico providing $816,000 from 321 screens.

Paramount opened the thriller “Law Abiding Citizen” in the U.K., where it finished no. 4 in the market with $2.4 million from 354 screens.

Disney’s “G-Force” opened in China ($1.5 million from 300 screens), and drew $2.3 million overall during the weekend. The overseas gross for the animation title from producer Jerry Bruckheimer is $161.8 million.

Stars of the Twilight sagas new Moon, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart say that they are proud of their work. Their movie grossed more millions during the Black Friday celebration.

Pattinson and Stewart keep being rumored to be dating, and their new movie raked in a total of $17.9 million on Friday, pushing The Blind side, movie of Sandra Bullock at $16.2 million, out of its number one spot on Thursday. The couples hype obviously continues.

The Britsh star Pattinson told his native British newspaper that his new film new Moon is sexy. The sequel of the popular movie adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s best selling book have a lot of half naked guys. OK Magazine is reporting that Robert thinks the simmering tension, coupled with other elements in the story, are enough to dub it sexy. Robert went on to say: “Twilight is a big metaphor for sexual abstinence, and yet it’s erotic underneath.”

To read more on this story go to sassyqarla.com. do you think the movie new Moon is sexy? let us know your thoughts.

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Twilight star Taylor Lautner has revealed that he was bullied at school for being an actor.

The 17-year-old admitted that he wasn’t very confident when he was younger, which led to others picking on him in the playground.

He told Rolling Stone: “I was never extremely confident. Because I was an actor, when I was in school there was a little bullying going on. Not physical bullying but people making fun of what I do.”

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But Taylor says the bullies didn’t stop him from taking on the role of Jacob in Twilight: new Moon, which transformed him into a Hollywood heartthrob.

He said: “I just had to tell myself I can’t let this get to me. this is what love to do. and I’m going to continue to do it.”

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Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson), stars of The Twilight Saga: new Moon. Photograph: Kimberley French

Biggest. Midnight opening. Ever. And on a school night! God, where were we before the Twilight saga stole all our neurons, with its hormone-detonating tales of supernatural events in the rain-sodden town of Forks, Washington?

Who knows, but there will likely be some of you who are still holding out against surrendering to the teen phenomenon, little realising that your principled resistance is in fact nothing more than the series’ clunking abstinence metaphor in microcosm, and that not giving in to it is basically as frustrating as not losing your virginity to Edward Cullen because it’ll turn you into a vampire. (Incidentally, can a Professor of new Moon Studies get in touch and clarify whether Bella can do it with Jacob Black without catching werewolf? Lost in Showbiz is a little hazy on the theoretical sexual perils of the Twilight universe.)

Yet whatever your objection, know this. every time you type the words “what is Twilight?” or “why is the Guardian writing about this?”, not only does a fairy die, but a little more definition finds its way to Taylor Lautner’s hairless lycan abs, and will continue do so until his rectus abdominis stands out in such shocking relief that the mere sight of it or any of its attendant muscles will prevent anything about war, pestilence, famine, death or the truth about 9/11 ever being covered again in this newspaper – and indeed any other. So at some point you need to decide whether you’re going to be part of the problem or part of the solution.

Once you’ve picked the right lane – welcome, age-inappropriate Twi-hards – you will realise that was merely the first step, and that you’re still quite the awkward stranger in your new domain. just like Bella! Fiddling really awkwardly with your hair should help, though you might care instead to attend your first over-18 new Moon prom – there’s one on in Newcastle tomorrow night – or perhaps to join the ineffably troubled community that is twilightmoms.com.

For the less damaged, there are other ways in. The Guardian’s legions of Wire fans who laughed knowingly into their martinis when the drug dealers called their packages names such as WMD, or Pandemic, may find something they can latch on to in this week’s news that Twilight-branded heroin baggies have been seized on Long Island. Fo’ real, and so on. There’s an idiosyncratically rendered likeness of Robert Pattinson on the wrap, so ask yourselves if there’s any face you’d rather see before you slump back into diamorphine-facilitated oblivion? Except the fashion-forward hoppers among you, who will of course be looking to tighten the ligature around your upper arms while gazing at the packaging for the as-yet unreleased Jacob Smack.

Needless to say, Twilight heroin is far from being the most disturbing unauthorised Twilight product. At present that would probably be a toss-up between the vibrating Edward doll and the babygrow reading “My Mommy is a Bella” – but we’ll deal with those once your stabilisers are off.

For now, it’s time for your primer on perhaps the defining quality of the new Moon juggernaut: the total and utter inability of any adult mortal to put a dent in it. “Charisma by Madame Tussaud”, fumes venerable film critic Roger Ebert, as the film prepares effortlessly to hold its position at the top of the box office on both sides of the Atlantic this weekend. “We struggled to see in new Moon a metaphor of teen conformity and longing but found only a muddle,” sniffs the Hollywood Reporter. “We tried to locate in it some comment on post-Aids, Christian rock-era abstinence and found nothing you couldn’t get in a church-group public service announcement.” A verdict that will merely have prompted a thousand Twi-hards to ask: “Can I get a supersize serving of Wolf Pack abs in a church-group public service announcement? in which case, sign my ass up for a silver ring now. It’s only one orifice that’s sinful, right?”

“Sorry girls,” sneers the Boston Globe, “the thrill is gone.” Um, sorry Boston Globe or whatever, but the thrill just got his chest waxed. Do you see, entry-level Twi-hards? never mind abstinence. It’s an impotence metaphor. every single thing any middle-aged man writes is useless – powerless! meaningless! – in the face of a gazillion teenage girls. Time for this week’s gratuitous literary analogy: it’s like that bit in A Passage to India when Mrs Moore visits the Marabar Caves and discovers that whatever is spoken into their dark recesses, it all comes back as the same terrifying echo of nullity. “Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce ‘boum’ . . . The echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life . . . it had murmured to her ‘Pathos, piety, courage – they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.’”

Boum, boum, boum . . . This is the Twilight industrial complex, my darlinks – and you’re living in it. You may as well offer it your neck today.

In theaters

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON, directed by Chris Weitz, written by Melissa Rosenberg, 130 minutes, rated PG-13.

The new Chris Weitz movie, “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” had the sold-out audience at my screening heaving and sighing so often — usually when a young man’s shirt came off, which was often — here’s a recommendation for those who haven’t seen it: Bring an oxygen tank. You’ll need it and a mask, particularly in the presence of so much heaving and sighing and busy shiftlessness.

I’m telling you, if the crowd is packed, the air will be sucked free from the room. Just saying.

This follow-up to “Twilight,” which also is based on a Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling novel, is custom-made for hormonal ‘tween girls just as the “Star Wars” movies were made for sci-fi loving young boys.

So let’s give it up to its creators because regardless of how drawn out and dumb this movie is, with $142 million in the bank last weekend alone, this movie knows what its audience wants — shirtless boys, chaste kisses, and a female character caught between the hotness of two hotties (a werewolf, a vampire) who apparently is willing to throw garlic cloves to the wind to give her soul to the latter.

About the young woman in question: her name is Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart); she’s slumming in Forks, Wash., with her single dad, Charlie (Billy Burke), and her hormones are boiling over as if lit by a satanic hellfire.

We don’t know this because Bella expresses her emotions easily. She’s nearly a mute, poor thing, parting her lips but saying as little as possible, but because when the vampire, Edward (Robert Pattinson), decides he must remove himself from her life in order to protect her from his kind, she literally writhes in pain, screams out in agony and has nightmares that suggests one hell of an epic yearning.

With Edward gone for most of the movie, there to pick up the pieces for Bella is Jacob (Taylor Lautner), her lifelong friend who wants more than a friendship with her. Together, they grow close over motorcycles, mutual sidelong glances and his bulging new muscles. But here’s the thing; turns out Jacob has a gene that allows him to morph into a werewolf.

Who knew? he didn’t. and here’s the real issue at hand. Just as with Edward, if the two take the risk of edging toward sexual intimacy, Jacob could potentially harm her if things got out of hand between them. after all, all one has to do is look at the shredded face of one of the wives of Jacob’s werewolf leaders to know how dire having sexy times with a werewolf can be. Just as it could with Edward, it might cost Bella her life, or at the very least, a disfigurement. and who wants that?

Bella does — of course, she does — though not with Jacob. She wants Edward, who appears to her in ghostly flashes during those moments when she nearly harms herself. These moments fuel her desire for him even more. after all, he wouldn’t appear to her if he didn’t love her! and so as the movie unfolds, she becomes more and more determined to have him back in her life so she can strip down and give him her, um, soul.

What unspools from this is another glum film about the perils of teen intimacy that still finds life hinging on abstinence and morality. While those are fine messages to send out to young audiences, the way it’s played here is so brooding, it’s nearly bloodless. that is, of course, until the film’s final moments, when real heat emerges in Italy.

Just what goes down there, we’ll leave for you, but it says a lot for the movie that the two most interesting characters come at the end — Dakota Fanning rules the screen as a dead vampire zealot with a mean stare, a tight golden bun and a hot clip; and Michael Sheen creates all kinds of chaos as the leader of all vampires. Each ooze menace to the point that you think, finally, characters who fill up a room, tear up the scenery and allow fear to creep into your heart. These two actors are so superior to the juiceless love otherwise served up in the movie, you can’t help wishing they had a movie of their own.

WeekinRewind.com is the site for Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s blog, DVD giveaways and movie reviews. Smith’s reviews appear Fridays and weekends in Lifestyle, as well as on bangordailynews.com. he may be reached at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.

Renting a DVD? NEWS film critic Christopher Smith can help. Below are his grades of recent releases. those capped and in bold print are new to stores this week.

Angels & Demons — C-

Bruno — C

Drag Me to Hell — B+

Dragonball: Evolution — C

Fast & Furious — B-

Funny People — C+

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past — D

Hannah Montana: The Movie — C-

I love You, Man — B+

Land of the Lost — BOMB

My Bloody Valentine 3-D — B-

Observe and Report — C-

Race to Witch Mountain — C-

Sunshine Cleaning — B

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 — B

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen — D

X-Men Origins: Wolverine — B-

By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor
Published: 4:12PM GMT 26 Nov 2009

Westrate, 17, has now confessed to police that the middle-aged man only kissed her on the neck and she was a willing participant.

She now faces the possibility of criminal charges for wasting police time, according to celebrity news site TMZ.

Westrate went on television claiming that she was attacked at a screening of The Twilight Saga: new Moon at the Cinema Carousel in Norton Shores.

Police released a grainy image of the suspect and appealed for information.

Speaking to the local Fox 17 news channel, Westrate claimed the man was sitting behind her during the film and made a number of sexually suggestive comments which she ignored. When the movie ended, the man lunged at her, she said.

She said: “We started to walk away and I got maybe two feet from my chair and he pulled me back by my hair and bit me on the neck. He was just smiling at me in the creepiest way.”

Westrate said she was left with a bite mark on her neck, which had disappeared by the time she appeared on television.

Offhand, it would be hard to think of a pop phenomenon as rapturously beloved as the Twilight saga that is also as vociferously hated. My God, the hate! If swoony-gauzy teen-bloodsucker romanticism with a golden-eyed indie-rock James Dean as love object isn’t your cup of passion, then fine — so be it. but why the frothing torrents of resentment? I was seriously shocked, for instance, reading some of the comments on Lisa’s recent post, to see that this much stone-pelting hostility could be directed at an actress as lovely and expressive as Kristen Stewart. What is her crime? having a personality moody and brainy and distinctive enough that it carries over, maybe a bit too much, from one role to the next? (That was true, as well, of the young Jane Fonda, whom Stewart often recalls.) It makes me wonder what, deep down, is getting the haters so flea-bitten scratchy under the collar.

Frankly, I think it’s this: The ascendance of the Twilight saga represents an essential paradigm shift in youth-gender control of the pop marketplace. For the better part of two decades, teenage boys, and overgrown teenage boys, have essentially held sway over Hollywood, dictating, to a gargantuan degree, the varieties of movies that get made. Explosive truck-smashing action and grisly machete-wielding horror, inflated superhero fantasy and knockabout road-trip comedy: It has been, at heart, a boys’ pig-out, a playpen of testosterone at the megaplex. sure, we have “chick flicks,” but that (demeaning) term implies that they’re an exception, a side course in the great popcorn smorgasboard.

No more. with New Moon, the Twilight series is now officially as sweeping a juggernaut on the big screen as it ever was between book covers. And that gives the core audience it represents — teenage girls — a new power and prevalence. Inevitably, such evolutions in clout are accompanied by a resentful counter-reaction. For if power is gained, then somewhere else (hello, young men!) it must be lost. yet such is the populist magic of Hollywood that these movies can’t simply be written off as some overblown high-school vampire version of a Miley Cyrus concert. or, more to the point, they can be (hello, haters!), but that completely misses what’s going on in them.

I went into New Moon having not read the book, and so I didn’t really experience the movie as an adaptation, or watch it as any sort of Twilight die-hard. Leaving aside a few leaping boy-to-wolf transformations (which could, at this point, have come out of any routine horror film), what I saw, in essence, was a moody romantic melodrama from the 1950s, a movie that told its story, more than anything else, with faces. For two hours, they loomed up there — Stewart, with her pale crystalline severity, her ability to communicate desire and distress at the same moment; Robert Pattinson, with his sweet-but-not-too-safe, hurtin’-eyed, chalky-skinned delinquent chivalry; and Taylor Lautner, with those naturally wolfy features, as the group’s Troy Donahue, a friendly, quick-grinned stud-muffin who’s just buff enough to divert the heroine without threatening to capsize her devotion to her true love.

The key to New Moon’s appeal, of course, is that a lack of consummation is built into the movie’s very premise, and so the sexiness, as it was in the ’50s, has to emerge almost entirely from the atmosphere, and from the interplay of those faces. And that, more than anything, is what makes this a picture dominated, in spirit, by a new kind of girl power. Mock me all you want (and from the haters, I expect nothing less), but the reason I believe that the big-screen success of the Twilight saga bodes well for the future of Hollywood movies is that the teenage girls who are lining up to see New Moon are asserting, in an almost innocent way, their allegiance to a much older form of pop moviemaking: the narcotic potency of mood, story, and romantic suggestion over the constant visual wham-pow! of action, effects, and packaged sensation. It’s not that New Moon has none of that stuff. It’s that the movie uses fantasy to liberate, rather than to steamroll, its emotions. That’s what makes it a new-style, feminine-driven brand of popcorn, one that’s more than welcome at a moment when the other kind — the boys’ kind — has grown more than a bit stale.

“New Moon” will fade over the long Thanksgiving weekend, but it still has a virtual lock on no. 1 at the box office.

While three movies — “Old Dogs,” “Ninja Assassin,” and “The fantastic Mr. Fox” — are opening or expanding nationwide on today, the biggest story will be how much “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” declines from its massive $142.8 million domestic opening. all signs point to a drop about equal to that of the original “Twilight” on Thanksgiving weekend last year: 62%. Ticket sales for the sequel have followed roughly the same trend as its predecessor each day since opening Friday.

An equivalent decline over the holiday would give “New Moon” a domestic gross of about $85 million from Wednesday through Sunday and $55 million for the three-day weekend. By the end of the week, its domestic total could easily be $250 million.

Overseas, where the “Twilight” sequel opens in 33 new territories this week on top of its existing 24, the total could easily be the same. So far its international gross is $132 million.

After “New Moon” blew away expectations last weekend, however, few in Hollywood feel comfortable making predictions on how it will perform going forward. It’s quite possible that the movie could beat industry predictions once again.

How much will “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” make on its second weekend?(opinion)

Last weekend’s no. 2 picture, meanwhile, has a good shot at holding on to that position as well. Alcon Entertainment’s “The Blind Side” opened to a very strong $34.1 million and earned a perfect A+ score from audiences, indicating that its second weekend decline will be mild.

The highest-profile movie opening today may be the one in the most trouble. Walt Disney Studios’ comedy “Old Dogs” is on track to significantly underperform the very similar “Wild Hogs.” while the latter picture, which also starred John Travolta and was directed by Walt Becker, opened to $39.7 million in March 2007, the new movie will likely sell less than $30 million worth of tickets over the five-day holiday weekend, according to people who have seen pre-release polling.

“Old Dogs” appears to be generating some interest among adults over 30, but it’s unclear whether families — needed to boost the box office — will attend.

“Ninja Assassin” is targeting young men and is tracking decently with that audience. dark Castle Entertainment and Legendary Pictures produced the action movie, which stars the Korean action star Rain and will be distributed by Warner Bros., for a little less than $50 million. It’s on track to gross about $20 million over five days.

20th Century Fox is opening its well-reviewed stop-motion animated flick “Fantastic Mr. Fox” around the country after it racked up a healthy $562,000 over the last two weeks in four theaters. while the studio is trying to market the film to a family audience — one ad touted it as “from the studio that brought you ‘Ice Age,’ ” although the two pictures are very different in style — it doesn’t appear to be catching on and may struggle to gross more than $10 million from Wednesday through Sunday. “Mr Fox,” which cost about $35 million to produce and is based on the children’s book by Roald Dahl, appears to be generating more interest from young male fans of director Wes Anderson than parents of young kids.

In the U.K., home country of Dahl where the movie opened Oct. 23, it has already collected a solid $13.7 million.

In limited release this weekend, The Weinstein co. opens the post-apocalyptic drama “The Road,” based on the Cormac McCarthy novel, in 113 theaters in the U.S. and Canada. 2929 Productions financed the film for about $25 million, but Weinstein co. is distributing it and footing the marketing costs.

Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog,” the studio’s first hand-drawn animated feature in five years, debuts at two theaters in Los Angeles and New York City today. because ticket prices will be exceptionally high as part of an experience including games and other activities, per theater grosses will undoubtedly be large.

Top photo: Ella Bleu Travolta, John Travolta and Conner Rayburn in “Old Dogs.” Credit: Ron Phillips / Disney.

Bottom photo: Rain in “Ninja Assassin.” Credit: Juliana Malucelli / Warner Bros. Pictures.