When I saw The Dark Knight on opening weekend, I was surprised when the 9am showing was packed, and even more surprised when I came out of the theater that lines had already formed for showings starting two hours later. After last weekend, the Dark Knight slid into the #2 Box Office Gross position at $477 million, surpassing Star Wars at $460 million, and just below Titanic at $600 million. But what is it that keeps bringing audiences in droves to see this movie, week after week?

Now, I saw the The Dark Knight, but honestly, I had a much more enjoyable time watching Iron Man. Of course, it just may be that people need something to watch, and something good like the Dark Knight must be better than some of the crap in the movie theaters right now (I'm looking at you, Clone Wars).

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince moves to Summer 2009.

"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the sixth installment in the blockbuster film franchise about boy wizard Harry, is moving from its planned Nov. 21 release to July 17, 2009, distributor Warner Bros. said Thursday.

The trailer for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince looks fantastic. The movie comes out in November.

Much to the amusement of everyone around me, I actually wanted to see Speed Racer, even after Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a of 35. I was never a fan of the original cartoon, as I was a bit too young to have ever seen the series in the United States. Unlike Transformers, this childhood cartoon making the transition to live-action keeps much of the source material intact, almost to the detriment of the movie; the antics of Spritle and Chim-Chim will delight young children, but will not be appreciated by adults. Much of this movie is computer generated, and the colors are super saturated, to give the film a quality that is vaguely reminiscent of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The racing in the movie feels like a Super Mario Cart track -- the one known as Rainbow Road, in which there are physics-defying elements to the course. I found myself entertained by the film, and bedazzled by the art direction; but this film is not for everyone. Speed Racer is solidly a children's film and will likely not appeal to those past the age of 12. The major problem of Speed Racer, and probably the major criticism of most film critics is simply that it is too juvenile.

Speed Racer definitely lacks the more sophisticated humor that makes children's films entertaining for adults. Speed Racer is definitely a film that is not to be taken seriously at all, but to be enjoyed just for the pure eye candy.

Go Speed Racer Go Music Video

The news this morning in the tech world seems to be that Apple has managed to negotiate the same date of release on iTunes as DVD retail release; new titles are 14.99, and older catalog titles are 9.99. Part of the reason this is such a major victory for Apple is that when this was done on the music side, there was a noticeable increase in iTunes sales, and a decline in retail sales of albums. For music, I can understand the appeal; consumers were buying music, ripping it into MP3, and then copying it onto their music player; iTunes managed to save them the work and know-how of putting their music CD into a format their music player could use. For movies, it isn't quite as simple; iTunes Movies aren't a format TiVo or other DVRs understand, and putting a movie onto an iPod takes up a substantial amount of space.

One of the small victories that Apple has won by doing this, of course, is making it easier for consumers to get the latest releases. Apple's rentals business is certainly interesting; most consumers want to pay to own their media, not rent it, and it is especially true for movies, but until Apple can get the AppleTV capturing the living room market, the way the iPod has captured consumers on the go, I just don't see downloadable video replacing DVD sales anytime soon; it may be for this reason that movie studios have gone ahead with this agreement; previously, DVD sales had a 30-45 day head start on iTunes, in order to preserve the revenue stream of DVD sales. I never saw this as much of a problem, as those who download and those who purchase DVDs are two entirely different audiences; the customers who purchase a DVD are different from those customers seeking to download a movie to watch on their computer. Until Apple can get iTunes onto the living room television, iTunes isn't really competition for DVD sales.

For this panel, approximately 70% of the population of Hall A filtered out after X-Files went backstage, allowing us to snatch some seats up front.

As always, the trailer for the movie was shown, as well as some scenes from the movie. While they had originally intended to do Harold and Kumar in Amsterdam, there were too many Euro-trip comedy movies that were being released, and so they wanted to do something more topical, and so they changed the setting to Guantanamo Bay. All the post 9-11 Homeland security stuff gave them tons of material to work with.

Harold and Kumar will premiere at the International Asian American Film Festival in San Francisco. John Cho can't talk too much about Star Trek, since J.J. Abrams really wants things to surprise the audience.

The movie looks great, and the most important thing for the writers was that they wanted to portray Harold and Kumar as real people, like the ones that they grew up around, but also they wanted to make a movie that was just as good as the first movie.

Each panel in Hall A is split between two presentations, giving each presentation about a half hour to show the trailers/bonus material, and then time for a question and answer session. Howard Berger of the Prince Caspian Special Effects department was there to answer questions.

This panel began with the showing of the trailer, which included some incomplete CG shots -- the CG critters were smoothly rendered without the application of fur or hair, and the centaurs were just wireframes.

Questions in the session included "Do you hope to make them all?" (Yes) and which is your favorite character (Mr. Tumnus). Most of the post-production work is being done in New Zealand by WETA, and they're still working on finishing the movie.

For Wall-E, Andrew Stanton of Pixar "came all the way from Emeryville" (across the bridge, basically for all those who are not familiar with Bay Area geography) to show us the extended trailer of Wall-E, as well as three clips from the movie: Wall-E shows Eve his truck, Wall-E leaves Earth, and Wall-E on Eve's ship.

Talking about Wall-E, Stanton said that the inspiration for Wall-E came from Luxo Jr, the animated lamp in the first Pixar short, and also from him playing with binoculars at an Oakland A's game, in which he realized that you could attach emotion to the movement of the binoculars --happy, sad, happy, sad. Someone asked whether Johnny Five of Short Circuit had any influence on Wall-E's design, and the answer was that he saw the movie once. When designing Wall-E, Stanton said he didn't want a humanoid robot for Wall-E, he wanted a machine. The design of Wall-E was dictated by Wall-E's function; the box for his body is because he needs to compact the garbage, the treads are so that he can move over obstacles, and the eyes mainly came from the binoculars.

When asked what kind of story Wall-E is, Stanton replied "It's a love story", and hearing the crowd reacting with groans, he added "it's a good one!".

Wall-E is not intended to be a True-3D film -- the first one that will be is Toy Story 3.

Stanton said that he was totally geeked out working with Ben Burtt, who did most of the sound effects for Lucasfilm, who is now at Pixar, making sounds for Wall-E. Look for Pizza Planet in the first 20 minutes of the film, and John Ratzenberger has a speaking role in this film as well.

Back in 1967, Speed Racer was a highly popular anime series about a boy and his race car, and now has become, like all things of our 70s childhood, a movie.

Directed by the Wachowskis (Matrix), the trailer looks like a cartoon adaptation, and the inclusion of John Goodman gives the movie a Flintstones-like feel to it. Of course, you can't possibly have a Wachowski movie without martial arts in it, and they seem to have added ninjas to fill that prerequisite.

This is the music video for Ivy's Sonata of Temptation:

This is the portion of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children it was clearly inspired from:

Square Enix, makers of the Final Fantasy game took the video production company to court. The video's director, Hong Jeong-ho, claimed the video as being merely a parody, which Square Enix (and ultimately the court judge) disagreed with. In the end, the video production company Fantom was fined $10,900, while both Fantom's director and the video's director were fined an additional $6,500 each. In the United States, the copyright infringement fines would have been many times that.

Now, as plagiarism in writing is clearly now very easily detected, as media gets more complex, will we see a similar shift in plagiarism or will it simply be too complicated to monitor and too easy to modify into the broad category of parody for such purposes? (For instance, I don't see people re-shooting Star Wars shot for shot with their own costumes on YouTube yet)

The movie adaptation of the Golden Compass opened this weekend, pulling in $27 million dollars in box office revenue, and being number one, but as far as family films based on book adaptations go, this is not a good sign, as $200 million was spent to make the film, and other films have had substantially larger opening weekends:

Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire - $102.6M opening

Harry Potter & the Prioner of Azkaban - $93.6M opening

Harry Potter & the Sorcerer-s Stone - $90.2M opening

Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets - $88.3M opening

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - $72.6M opening

The Chronicles of Narnia - $65.5M opening

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - $62M opening

The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring - $47.2M opening

The Golden Compass - $27M opening (estimate)

Eragon - $23.2M opening

Bridge to Terabithia - $22.5M opening

Stardust - $9.1M opening