Even though 2008 was a good year for the box office, budgetary concerns remain foremost in many studios' thoughts. What better way to help shore up cash intake than to make movies with huge merchandising potential? Look at the blockbuster Transformers, for example. Hasbro will be following up with a sequel, as well as movies based on their board games, like Candy Land, Monopoly, and the ol' party-pleaser, the Oujia board. Not to be outdone, Mattel will be getting into the action with a live-action Barbie movie and a movie revolving around their Hot Wheels toy line. Man, it's like the Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour come to life.

Sometimes a director will torpedo ticket sales for his own movie because he feels it just didn't live up to its promise, as Matthieu Kassovitz did when his Babylon A.D. sucked like a Hoover. It's rarer that a director will discourage fans from seeing a movie because he feels it's really good. Rarer, and you might say, downright illogical. But there is sort of a method to Robert B. Weide's madness when he tells us we shouldn't buy the Region 1 DVD for his film How to Lose Friends & Alienate People. Weide believes in the movie, loves the movie, but the DVD just doesn't cut it.

While some people were excited to see Titanic duo Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio teaming up again for Revolutionary Road, some of us were eagerly waiting for another big movie pair-up... for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, co-stars of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Not only will they buddy up again as comic book geeks for 2010's Paul (which the two also wrote) but they've also just been confirmed for Steven Spielberg's big-screen adaptation of Belgian artist Hergé's comic strips, The Adventures of Tintin. The two will play Thompson and Thompson, a pair of bumbling detectives who will be showing up earlier in than they did in Hergé's work, where they first stumbled onto the scene in Tintin's fourth adventure.

Apparently, Cinema Paradiso got it all wrong: Being a film projectionist is not a magical, life-changing experience. It's scary as hell. At least that's what comic book company Studio 407's new project, The Night Projectionist, wants us to think.

Will Smith was voted the best moneymaker at the box office for 2008, the second time a black actor has been at the top of that list. (The first? Sidney Poitier in 1968.) Okay, I get that Will Smith is a big box-office draw, and I've even been known to acknowledge how well his movies tend to do at the box office. (Seven Pounds is looking like an exception.) But, um, "voted"? "Voted"? As in, they cast a ballot on who made the most money?

Proving this country loves nothing if not its dogs, Marley & Me held tight to its position at the top of the box office this weekend, adding $24.1 million, for a two-week total of $106.5. Impressive, yes? Indeed. Even for a dog film. According to Box Office Mojo, it's "the third-highest grossing dog movie on record," a coveted position, as we all know. It falls behind only Scooby-Doo (really? That movie?) and 101 Dalmatians, and is fast approaching the top of that list.