According to the expected year-end box-office data figures compiled by Hollywood.com, the industry raked in $10.1 billion for 2011 in North America.

While that seems like a nice haul, it’s 4.5 percent less than in 2010. While not enough to result a major downturn in limo-riding and Botox, the results are likely to cause entertainment moguls some worry, since they are accompanied by continuing trends, including another year of lower attendance.

And given that the revenue was unusually bolstered by more higher-priced 3-D movie-ticket prices — Hollywood released several dozen 3-D films in 2011, double the previous year’s amount — the latest numbers are even more disappointing.

While some holiday movies did well — namely “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,” which has taken in about $70 million domestically since its opening less than two weeks ago — it pales in comparison to such digital hits as Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 videogame, which pulled in $400 million in one day from the much-desired youth market.

It surpassed $1 billion in sales in 16 days, eclipsing the box office of the blockbuster movie “Avatar,” which took 17 days to gross seven figures.

Does that mean that the continued competition for the leisure time of pretty much everyone between digital and analog has gotten worse — an epic battle of the movie industry versus game players, tablets and smartphones?

Or is it because so many movies made in 2011 turned out to be just awful? (If you saw “New Year’s Eve,” you’ll know exactly what I mean.)

One thing is clear: No one is going to pay for poor-quality content, no matter the screen size.

More number-crunching to come, as the industry debates the issue into 2012 (coincidentally, the title of a movie I happened to like, as you can see below!), and at the upcoming D: Dive Into Media at the end of the month, down near Los Angeles, in the belly of the Web-smacked beast.

Until then, let’s hope it does not come to this next year:

Maybe that’s because the most charming part of the film was the clips from a pair of YouTube appearances by four-year-old Kellen Sarmiento, who is channeling cast member Darren Criss, the lead singer of the Warblers on the hit television show.

You’ll get it when you see the tiny star in a school blazer, doing his version of Pink’s “Raise Your Glass” and Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”:

It seems the computer-generated imagery in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” convinced critics and audiences that the well-worn movie series prequel is a winner.

It grabbed $54 million at the box office over its opening weekend.

Its producer, Peter Chernin, told me that a lot more of the film than it seems — including the stunning opening scenes in the wild that look like a real-life nature special — were mostly CGI, used to prep audiences for extended scenes of the apes morphing into believable rebels.

Here is the last trailer for the movie:

This research paper was produced by two social-computing researchers at HP Labs: Bernardo Huberman and Sitaram Asur. It’s titled “Predicting the Future With Social Media” [PDF here], and it looks at Twitter as a means of predicting the box-office success of newly release films based on the number of people tweeting about them and the sentiments contained in those tweets.

They argued that Twitter was a far better predictor of box-office success than the motion picture industry’s “tracking” reports that studios have used for years. In fact, the two researchers said at the time that Twitter could predict with nearly 98 percent accuracy whether a movie would be a hit or a flop in its first weekend of release. For the study, they mined nearly three million tweets referring to 24 different movies over a time period of three months.

Fflick does some sentiment analysis of its own, but uses that data to help Twitter users decide whether they are going to buy a ticket to a movie based on whether their Twitter friends liked it. Could it be that Google wants to mine that same sentiment data to help movie studios predict box-office sales?

As I said, this is only a theory–one that I admit I’m stretching to the max. I can’t find any connection between the two researchers and Ffflick’s four founders, or its investors, which includes the Founders Fund, though there needn’t be one for my theory to be close to the mark. Fflick was started in August of last year, about five months after the paper was published. And the paper itself was widely covered at the time, in particular by the Los Angeles Times.

Since neither Google nor Fflick is commenting on this deal, which is supposedly still pending, I thought it was worth suggesting as a possible motivation on Google’s part.

Electronista thinks it may have something to do with forecasting popularity on Google’s forthcoming YouTube movie project and the need to predict.

I did check in with the paper’s principal author, Huberman, by email to ask what he thought. His reply: “Sentiment analysis of tweets is great for marketing studies and Google wants to go there since they have search going on with Twitter.” Time will tell if this is what Google has on its mind.

That’s not much of a surprise, given the relentless marketing campaign by the makers of “The Social Network,” which opened wide last Friday. It has garnered terrific critical acclaim.

Still, BoomTown was quite surprised to see a mention of the film on one of my favorite celebrity sites, TMZ.com.

Of course, because it is gossip-saturated, TMZ featured it as one of its naughty regular features called “Who’d You Rather?”

As in…well, you get the point.

This time they pitted Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg against the Winklevoss twins in a “Facebook Fight.”

“As part of the movie ‘The Social Network,’ twin brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss claim their Harvard [University] classmate Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea and created what is now this little website called Facebook,” TMZ wrote.

Also surprising, as you can see from the screenshot above, given what hunks of dudeness the Winklevii clearly are, is that Zuckerberg seems to be attracting one-third of the votes compared with their two-thirds.

And since there are two of them, the billionaire social networking wunderkind could be considered tied with the brothers!

Sweet justice after the slamming the Winklevii have been giving Zuckerberg in the media of late, even though they had signed a confidentiality agreement after their first $65 million settlement with him?

The Winklevii are trying to have that overturned and are inexplicably going for more, of course, which should keep the themes of the movie resonating for a while.

That will also be true if “The Social Network” garners some award nominations, especially the Oscar.

Also interesting will be to see if the movie will perform well this weekend or will drop off. It’s so far proved popular in the big cities on the coasts and in Silicon Valley, but now it has to go wide to make some real dough.

But, for sure, it will be on television eventually. Today, the FX cable network said it had bought the broadcast premiere rights to the movie.

It’s just a post on the popular entertainment blog “Deadline Hollywood.”

But it’s a clear indication the makers of the movie about the origins of Facebook are gunning for maximum attention and Oscar buzz with only a few weeks to go before its debut.

In fact, awards columnist Pete Hammond was pretty much channeling the marketing plan of Oscar-winning producer Scott Rudin for “The Social Network,” which has its premiere in New York on September 24 and its wide rollout on October 1.

Rudin–the volcano of a producer about whom I would like to see a biopic like the one he is sticking it to Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg with–has apparently been personally inviting every online chatterbox (not me!) and their mother to screenings of the film from the Sony (SNE) movie unit, Columbia Pictures, in recent weeks.

Writes Hammond:

It’s a smart strategy but even without a personal invitation from one of the film’s producers this is already the current must-see movie on every Oscar watchers list. As an example of that, one blogger actually got on a plane from Toronto to New York just to see Social Network, then headed immediately back to Toronto. His subsequent review was a rave declaring it the one to beat for Best Picture (a little premature on that I think). That’s just one example of the praise now starting to hit the Internet from Hitfix to Slashfilm to Chud and all cyber points inbetween.

A little premature perhaps, but it seems to have worked with Hammond:

I saw it at the first opportunity on Monday and would have to say fairly objectively that The Social Network is Sony’s best shot at Best Picture in years, a lock for Golden Globe and Critics Choice Awards. And most importantly, Oscar nominations in every major category including Director for David Fincher, Writing for Aaron Sorkin, lead actor for Jesse Eisenberg (playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg), Supporting Actor for both Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score, editing and so on. It also looks like it will be a major box office hit, hitting a nerve with the young demographic that are on the front lines of moviegoers…

Despite its high-tech bones, what Fincher and Sorkin have managed to do is tell a time-honored very human story, a social document for a generation that has as much relevance now as movies like On The Waterfront, Network, All The President’s Men, and The Graduate did in their time.

Expect more of the same from those who get sucked up into the marketing machine for “The Social Network” in the next weeks, even though it appears it will be devastating to the real-life version of its main subject, Mark Zuckerberg.

And really, really unfair, according to MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka, by taking one aspect of his personality–awkward arrogance or perhaps arrogant awkwardness–and twisting it into a much deeper malevolence.

I have no doubt in my mind that Zuckerberg pulled an epic geek sandbagging on the clueless Winklevoss twins by promising to work on their goofy concept for a social networking site at Harvard University, then not doing so and working on his own ideas instead.

And, for sure, he had a painfully typical start-up falling-out with his own early partners.

But let’s get real here–they all got paid off plenty for being present at the creation of something they themselves never could have created.

Does anyone honestly believe the Winklevii were capable of making Facebook, or any reasonable facsimile, any more than Zuckerberg was capable of rowing in the Olympics?

While hitting some right notes about Zuckerberg’s mannerisms–conversations with him can be very perplexing–the Mark of “The Social Network” is largely fictional.

Certainly, he has some glaring faults (and so do I!).

But they are no worse that other tech leaders’, from Bill Gates of Microsoft (MSFT) to Steve Jobs of Apple (AAPL) to Silicon Valley’s own twins, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google (GOOG).

Interestingly, the night before what turned out to be a very difficult onstage interview at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference in June, at a dinner just south of Los Angeles, Zuckerberg fretted to me about the film.

“It’s what a lot of people will think I am like, because it’s a movie and that has impact on their perceptions,” he said with a lot of concern in his voice.

I pooh-poohed his complaints and told him not to worry about it too much.

“It’s just a movie,” I said. “No one believes what they see at the movies anymore.”

But as this film chugs along–gaining Oscar velocity right onto the stage of the Academy Awards at the Kodak Theatre at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard on February 27, 2011–I can now see Zuckerberg might have been right all along.

It looks like the iPad isn’t Steve Jobs’s only hit these days.

As it turns out, the hottest movie this summer–and one of the season’s few big successes–looks like it might be “Toy Story 3.”

The third in the innovative flagship film franchise, it was made by the Pixar Animation Studios unit of Disney (DIS). While he did not actually craft this film, as he does his “magical” devices, guess who is Disney’s largest individual shareholder, with a seven percent stake?

Yes, the Apple (AAPL) CEO.

While a string of prominent movie sequels is getting panned and performing weakly at the movie box office, “Toy Story 3” is garnering near-perfect reviews, as well as piles of money.

The animated flagship film–being shown in 3-D, as are all movies it seems like now–was No. 1. in North America this past weekend, hauling in just over $110 million in its debut. It is now at $141 million, picking up another $43.4 million internationally.

No wonder: It got a 98 percent rating on the Rotten Tomatoes movie review site, which is pretty unprecedented.

(Ironically, the free iPhone app for “Toy Story 3” is getting really poor feedback at the iTunes store.)

But the accolades for the movie are much deserved–BoomTown took the kids last night, and we were all blown away by its humor and heart, as well as terrific animation.

Also the tear-jerking, but happy, ending.

That kind of quality has been pretty typical for Pixar, which Jobs bought from movie icon George Lucas in 1986 for $10 million and sold to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion.

That deal left Jobs as Disney’s largest individual shareholder and one of its directors.

He’s also making bank, with Disney shares up 46 percent compared with a year ago.

Of course, that’s nothing compared with Apple stock, which has spiked 94 percent since last year.

Which is what Hollywood would definitely call a very happy ending.

Until you see the movie, here’s an interesting video about the new characters in “Toy Story 3”:

Thirteen years later he did it again: “Avatar.” And as much as “Avatar” stretched the boundaries of the box office, it has stretched the boundaries of cinema as well. The 3-D film featured a staggering 2,500-plus special-effects shots, set a new standard for movie-making technology and may have ushered in a big-screen renaissance in the process.

Liveblog

Walt and Kara are bathed in blue! They look vaguely Avatar-like. And here comes Cameron, who lavishes praise on the red leather hot seats.

8:17 pm: Kara–You’ve embraced tech for a long time. Where did that start?

Cameron: I started as an FX guy. I had to figure out how all of that was done. We no longer use any of the tools I learned how to use. The artistic skills I developed haven’t changed.

8:18 pm: Walt–Do you think there’s a way to enjoy “Avatar” without seeing it in 3-D?

Cameron: Sure. Most of the work I do as a director doesn’t have to do with 3-D. The 3-D should be viewed as value-added. Everyone said you had to see “Avatar” in the theaters, in 3-D. But the DVDs have sold really well. If people have the choice, they use 3-D. If they don’t, 2-D works fine.

8:20 pm: Walt–So will there be a movie that requires 3-D?

Cameron: Sure. That could be an interesting experiment, but it would be a failure of narrative. Good movies scale–they work on iPhones, and on theater screens.

8:21 pm: Kara–We saw a not-good movie the other night ["Prince of Persia"--terrible], and every preview was for a 3-D movie.

Cameron: Yep. There’s going to be a period of time when we risk “debasing the coinage.” If we make people pay extra for a lousy movie, we’re going to be in trouble.

Walt: Who does it well?

Cameron: Jeffrey Katzenberg at DreamWorks. “How to Train Your Dragon” was sumptuous.

8:23 pm: Kara–Let’s talk about the tech involved in “Avatar.” What’s different about your 3-D and other 3-Ds?

Cameron: 3-D has had a rocky start-and-stop experience. He walks through the chronology of different tech. Fast-forward to 2000. First prototypes of projectors with very high frame rates. And I was working on the different end, working on a specialized camera. It still took a long time.

It was a very flat curve for a long time. Now it’s practically vertical. But prior to that, exhibitors didn’t want to pay to retrofit theaters for one movie a year. Studios wouldn’t do 3-D if there were no theaters, etc. I was proselytizing, but most people ignored me.

By 2005, I decided to make a big film in 3-D, “without the wink and snigger,” a serious film. “You know, I’m just going to go out there and do this, and let the chips fall where they may.”

I don’t want to take all the credit. There were a small number of people who were doing this: Robert Zemeckis, Katzenberg. Peter Jackson said he would do a 3-D movie, but didn’t. But the announcement was valuable in itself.

8:28 pm: Can you remake “Titanic” in 3-D?

Cameron: Yes.

Walt: Are you thinking about doing that?

Cameron: We’re not thinking about doing that, we’re doing it. We’ll have it ready for the ship’s 100th anniversary in 2012.

8:30 pm: Kara–Would you do this with “Terminator” and other older movies you’ve done?

Cameron: Depends. We’re going to spend months and millions converting “Titanic.” But if filmmakers do lousy jobs of conversions, “pop-up book style,” that’s going to get old quickly.

8:33 pm: Walt–So what about 3-D TV sets?

Cameron: Problem is that there’s not enough content right now. If you get every 3-D movie, you’ll have a good three days, and then you’re done.

8:33 pm: Walt–And most people have just bought sets recently.

Cameron: Right. But it will change over time. And if you’re buying today, go ahead and future-proof yourself by buying 3-D.

8:34 pm: Kara–Let’s talk about BP briefly. Tell us about your connection.

Cameron: There’s a story that the government went to Hollywood for help. But that’s not the case. I’ve just been interested and really involved in subs and wrecks for a long time. So over the last few weeks, I’ve been watching what’s happening and saying, “Those morons don’t know what they’re doing.” And then I realized I know a lot of people who work in deep submergence. They don’t do oil, but they know the engineering. So I got 23 people together for a brainstorming session at EPA headquarters. The EPA guys weren’t there; they were in the Gulf. But they hosted it.

Kara: You went to BP first?

Cameron: They could not have been more gracious. “But they said, ‘We’ve got this.’” Here’s the thing: We sat in a room for 10 hours and worked this problem. It’s a very complex problem, and it starts 18,000 feet down. Steel fails like it’s made out of butter. So you find out there are things that prevent them from doing obvious fixes.

But there are things that can be done. I want to say, I never thought I would be defending BP. Anyway, I started to shift perspective, to thinking that the government should be monitoring this stuff independently, and I can help with that.

Walt: Doesn’t the Navy have submarines?

Cameron: Yes. We work with them. Anyway, we’re working on a report, etc.

Walt: Is the White House involved in this?

Cameron: No, it’s a private effort.

8:40 pm: Kara–Let’s talk about Hollywood economics.

Cameron: “I think there was a time when Hollywood really didn’t get the rapidity of change. But we’re past that now.” Still, there’s a limit to how quickly they can change and still keep their business.

8:41 pm: Walt–There’s a lot of consumers and tech folks who think you should be able to see a movie or TV show whenever, wherever.

Cameron: You hear a lot of that. But it’s usually not from the people who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars making the film. [Scattered applause. Pretty sure I hear Rupert Murdoch, who's in the front, guffawing.]

8:43 pm: Walt–But why can’t I have it when and where I want?

Cameron: Now we’re at the first time when there is a real question: Do I want it now or do I want it great? People had a choice of watching a pirated version on a small screen, and enough people chose the theatrical experience to make it the highest-grossing movie ever.

Walt: But some people want to watch it on a small screen without stealing.

Cameron: Perhaps there are two percent of people under 30 who have a qualm about stealing. They went to the theater because it was a better experience.

8:45 pm: Kara attempts to talk about music, but stumbles on a Beatles album example. The big idea is that albums have gone away, replaced by singles, but movies don’t have that problem.

Cameron: Nope. But people do watch movies in different ways. Some are super-respectful and ritualistic; others multitask and watch picture-in-picture. At least here, the pendulum has swung back from doing that.

8:47 pm: Walt mentions people who haven’t seen “Avatar” in the theater [ahem]. They feel “trapped,” he says, because they want to see it in 3-D.

Cameron: I know. So we’re helping them out and re-releasing the movie in theaters in August. [Thanks!]

8:48 pm: Walt is still pressing on windows and the limits they put on consumer choice.

Cameron: I don’t really care because I won’t have another movie for three years, and by then, all of this will be worked out.

Kara: What’s the movie?

Cameron: Maybe four years. Either “Avatar 2″ or some other big movie that uses the same technology. 3-D.

8:51 pm: A tech discussion about frame rates, followed by Walt asking Cameron if he would deign to watch a movie on a laptop.

Cameron: Depends on the film. I won’t watch “2001″ on a laptop. But a funny movie would be fine. “The Hangover” would be just as funny on a laptop.

8:54 pm: A discussion about what technology can’t solve. You can make movies for less money, but the apparatus of promoting movies still requires a lot of money. And note that people who have success without a studio’s marketing arm with an indie movie–the next movie they make is a studio movie. I believe in letting people do what they’re good at. Studio marketing people do this every day. A day-and-date release, worldwide–that’s something to behold. A ton of work. We had something like 76, 78 discrete versions of “Avatar” that had to be prepped within five weeks for that.

8:58 pm: Walt–Is Silicon Valley involved in any part of what you do?

Cameron: Yes, but not in the way you might think. I went to Microsoft (MSFT), for instance, and asked for help with archiving and data. We started a year before the movie started on digital asset management. Microsoft has been a great partner.

9:00 pm: So you’re a big-deal director so you can work with Microsoft. Can other directors get help like that?

Cameron: For a movie like this, you need help from someone.

9:01 pm: Kara–Tell us about piracy. How big a problem is that for you?

Cameron: 3-D counteracted that for us. You could pirate the movie, but not the 3-D. That won’t hold forever, though.

9:04 pm: So where does Hollywood go?

Cameron: It doesn’t change much. You still need good stories, good casts, etc. Regardless of windows, augmented reality, etc. It’s still the same business. People have been talking about interactive movies since the 1980s. But we have those. They’re called games.

Walt: What do you think about games?

Cameron: Love them. Want to figure out ways to merge games and movies in next couple projects, where you can experience them in different ways.

Q&A

Can you talk about the Brazil controversy?

Cameron: I’ve been concerned about the environment for a long time and “Avatar” is about that, of course. So after the movie came out, it was so well received by the environmental community that all this stuff came flooding to me. I ended up going into “cause shock.” Ended up working with people in Brazil who are going through a situation that’s eerily similar to the “Avatar” plot.

Kara: What did you do for them?

Cameron: I created a rapport with them and then created a series of media events that bubbled it up to public consciousness in Brazil and for now, at least, put a halt to the dam they were building there.

Dumb question: I don’t get how you filmed it but it’s all CG [computer graphics]

Cameron: It’s not all CG. It’s about 60 percent CG. The film was shot in a virtual world, with a virtual camera. But another part is shot in live action.

Sorry, missed a couple questions.

Q: What do you consider your most personal film and what was the best advice you received when you started out?

A: “Avatar” is probably my most personal film. It really is an expression of everything that has meant something to me since I was five years old. The best advice I ever received? Roger Corman told me to sit down a lot while I was directing.

Q: Did you intend to elicit feelings of guilt toward the environment in the “Avatar” audience?

A: The intent was not to bitch-slap the audience but to take it outside of itself. Which is something that only film can do. By the end of “Avatar,” you’re looking at the human world from nature’s perspective and it doesn’t look so good.

And that’s a wrap.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

Especially with numbers like these: GE says NBCU’s Q4 revenue dropped four percent, to $4.3 billion, and operating profit declined 30 percent, to $602 million.

Were Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien’s ratings really that bad? Of course not.

NBC’s broadcast revenue was down 1.5 percent, but that was balanced by growth in the company’s cable properties, which were up eight percent. And not that I’m a Jeff Zucker apologist, but when pundits are castigating him for his late-night debacle, they really ought to point out that some parts of the company–the parts that Comcast wants, not coincidentally–have grown considerably during Zucker’s tenure.

In any case, GE blames this quarter’s decline on Hollywood: Its movie division has been low on box office hits, and its DVD group, like most other studios, has been sucking wind.

Here’s GE’s brief description of its business in charticle form (click to enlarge). Note the line about slow recovery in Web ads:

And here’s the best “screw you, NBC” clip I’ve seen from Conan this week. Which, as many Web commenters have noted, is not available on NBC’s Web site or via Hulu. But given that NBC has been fairly vigilant about pulling down unauthorized clips it doesn’t want on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, the network can’t be that upset about this one, which you can find all over the site:

“Current valuation on 2010 estimates of 4.7x revenue, 12.5x EBITDA and 30.7x EPS reflect investor optimism that the box office success of Avatar will be replicated with 3D releases in 2010 and beyond,” he writes in a research note.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

BoomTown is back from a lovely holiday vacation and am gearing up for the Consumer Electronics Show, which starts later this week in Las Vegas, but I have been struck by the $1 billion-plus haul that tech-heavy “Avatar” has brought in over that time.

Does this mean movies in theaters are holding their own against online incursions?

It would seem so, according to box office reports for the year. Tallies for the U.S. alone were up 10 percent to close to $10 billion for 2009.

Or is there trouble behind this success, since another key revenue stream is weakening?

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal today:

Last year was the first since 2002 that U.S. consumers spent more money buying movie tickets than buying movies to watch at home, underscoring the changing economics of Hollywood…

The figures indicate that studios will likely have to continue looking for ways to survive in a marketplace where they can’t count on hefty home-entertainment revenue to offset giant production costs. Those costs often more than eat up the studios’ half of the box-office receipts, which are split with theaters.

The ongoing decline in home-entertainment revenue has already fundamentally altered the way studios do business, forcing them to place big financial bets on hoped-for mass-market blockbusters at the expense of features that cost less to make but that also have smaller earnings potential.

Since online movie purchases and rentals are nowhere close in terms of revenue (see chart below), declining DVD sales could be a worrisome trend for Hollywood.

We’ll see what happens in 2010. Until then, here are videos of the top 10 most-viewed trailers of 2009, according to Yahoo (YHOO)–which garnered many tens of millions of views on its popular movie site.

Most–but not all–of them track on the big box-office winners, although the group includes an unusual one: “Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus,” starring Lorenzo Lamas, which was not exactly a hit.

Here they are:

No. 10: UP

No. 9: AVATAR

No. 8: MEGA SHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS

No. 7: STAR TREK

No. 6: G.I. JOE

No. 5: HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE

NO. 4: TERMINATOR SALVATION

No. 3: 2012

No. 2: TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN

No. 1: THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON

Despite all the obsession with the Web in this column, the big Hollywood movies opening around the holidays grab all the attention–and justifiably.

While new computers and game players are among the top-selling gifts, giant crowds of consumers have still descended and will be flocking to cineplexes across the country yesterday, today, tomorrow on Christmas Day, and throughout the weekend.

And from the first box office reports, it looks like “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” is besting sci-fi blockbuster “Avatar.”

Yes, pretty crude special effects–at least from what I saw in the first “Alvin” movie multiple times with my kids–and very charming chipmunks have earned almost $20 million so far, while the James Cameron-helmed story about a heroic blue-skinned indigenous tribe at risk is at $16 million.

Nonetheless, tech-heavy “Avatar” has done about $243 million at the box office worldwide since it opened last weekend, so it should not feel too bad about being beaten this weekend by a trio of singing rodents.

Here are videos of the competing trailers:

[Full disclosure: Both top two movies this weekend are from 20th Century Fox, which is owned by News Corp. News Corp. (NWS) also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.]

There has been plenty of online hay made over the latest of the “Twilight” movies, “New Moon,” which has turned out to be a blockbuster for Hollywood over the last two weekends, pulling in $474 million in worldwide box office.

Of course, there are the spoofs, including this pretty funny one about what’s coming up in the next two in the series, called “Eclipse” and “Breaking Dawn,” in which the Romeo and Juliet of the Undead move onto marriage and children, with some decided Wolfman complications.

What’s unusual about this one, from “Attack of the Show,” is that it stars Peter Facinelli, who plays “Twilight” paterfamilias vampire and doctor Carlisle Cullen, and the doctor here too.

Here’s the video:

Four years ago, the movie, “Snakes on a Plane,” became a genuine Internet phenom well before the movie was in theaters.

Which, in the end, only showed that online buzz had negligible impact on the viewing public, given that the movie’s box office turned out to be tepid at best.

But will another small film, about a demon-plagued couple with an infrared-equipped videocamera, called “Paranormal Activity,” prove that the chatter of Facebook and Twitter has more legs today?

It looks like it, given that the very-low-budget film–acquired by Viacom (VIA) studio Paramount Pictures as a remake–performed spectacularly well last weekend, selling out midnight-only shows focused on college towns.

That middle-of-the-night tactic was made larger this past weekend, creating a ton of online heat, which led to an expanded release planned for this coming weekend at all hours.

Of course, along with a clever television marketing push, the studio is using Internet feedback to discern where to head next and how.

Well, “Paranormal Activity” looks scary and all–although BoomTown would like to know exactly when people will stop trying to irk demonic spirits.

That quibble aside, it will be interesting to see if the reliance on Facebook (where the movie has about 32,000 fans, most whom are posting variations of “It scared the crap out of me!!!!”) and Twitter (where is it now a trending topic) turns a cult win into a mega-hit.

That’s what many predicted would happen to camp thriller “Snakes,” starring Samuel Jackson, especially considering the deluge of Internet frenzy starting in 2005 that actually forced Time Warner (TWX) studio New Line Cinema to finally release it.

But the movie buzz peaked too early, well before the film debuted, and it limped to a weak box office–leaving the blog-fueled “Snakes” as an asterisk in the annals of failed Web marketing hype.

So, until all the tweeting gets you to the theater–I shall pass, as I prefer skeletons in my closet–here is the clever promo for “Paranormal Activity,” as well as the classic line from “Snakes”:

A treat for those of you who love reading about Hollywood’s inner workings: About 7,800 words in this week’s New Yorker dedicated to power blogger Nikki Finke and those who fear her and/or read her. Which pretty much includes everyone in Hollywood.

It’s a classic New Yorker profile, which means it’s thorough and a great read, though there’s not much in the way of news there. Writer Tad Friend mentions Jay Penske’s purchase of Finke’s services in passing, and there’s no update of Penske’s and Finke’s plans to expand the site.

For the record, in late June, Finke said she’d have a New York correspondent hired within three months; four weeks ago, Penske told me said correspondent was going to be signed within two weeks.

What’s the status now? “Not ready to comment right now,” Finke says via email. I’ve also asked Penske for an update.

Back to the story. There’s a lot of inside baseball about the symbiosis between the studios and the people who write about them, and some smart reporting about the tradecraft of reporting and how it has been altered by the rise of blogging.

I also detected at least a whiff of allusion to Janet Malcolm’s famous description of journalism, published in the New Yorker two decades ago:

Finke’s code is the Hollywood code. She is for hard work, big box-office, stars who remain loyal to their agents and publicists, and the little guy–until, that is, the big guy chats her up. Then she’s for that big guy until some other big guy calls to stick it to the first big guy. And this, too, is the Hollywood code: relationships are paramount but provisional. One executive observes that people who heed Finke’s call to snark about their competitors shouldn’t get too comfortable: “The idea is, The lion won’t eat me if I throw it another Christian. It works for a day, but you’re going back to the Colosseum soon.”

The bond between journalists and their sources is always complex–you’re friends with benefits, without being friends–but its contingent nature is particularly apparent in Hollywood. Finke’s sources can hear in her voice when she sounds low or unwell, and will ask if she needs anything. She’s grateful for the solicitude, but determined to maintain the barrier between her and those she calls “these people.” “A veterinarian treats animals–he’s not an animal,” she says.

What does Finke think? Glad you asked. She has an entire post dedicated to it, of course.

The gist:

As I expected, it’s an amusing caricature, only occasionally true but hardly insightful. Still, I’m relieved that The New Yorker didn’t lay a glove on me. I found Tad Friend, who covers Hollywood from Brooklyn, easy to manipulate, as was David Remnick [the magazine's Pulitzer Prize-winning editor in chief] , whom I enjoyed bitchslapping throughout but especially during the very slipshod factchecking process.

No comment from Friend or the New Yorker’s PR staff, which sent me a copy of the article this afternoon.

The movie, an over-the-top retelling of World War II featuring a squad of Jewish Nazi hunters, brought in $37 million at the box office this weekend, which is about $10 million more than the Hollywood prognostication machine expected.

In the old days, you’d simply chalk up the difference to the fact that the Hollywood prognostication machine sometimes gets things wrong. But now when this happens, the impulse is to blame or praise Twitter. The theory: Audiences go to see the movie on Friday, then quickly tweet their 140-character reviews to their pals. This either keeps moviegoers away for the rest of the weekend or makes them flock to the theaters.

All of this sounds believable enough, but I have yet to see anyone spell out exactly how it works. The Hollywood Reporter, for instance, is a big proponent of the “Twitter saved Tarantino” theory. But its evidence is awfully weak: It just notes that some Twitter messages about the film have been positive.

At least NewTeeVee tries to put some numbers behind the argument. Using data from tracking service Trendrr, it notes that the volume of Tweets about the film increased over the weekend (see chart; click to enlarge).

Of course, volume alone doesn’t indicate anything: For all we know the messages were fixated on the mustache Brad Pitt’s character sports in the film. And in any case, we’re a long way from correlating Internet messages with real-world actions–just ask former presidential candidate Ron Paul’s ardent cyberfans.

But marketing always involves at least an equal part art for every part science, and when you add a superhyped, very new phenomenon like Twitter to the mix, all bets are off. Given the way these things work, expect Hollywood to assume that Twitter can now make or break a movie. And there will be an opportunistic flock of “social media” gurus ready to assure them–for just a small monthly retainer–that their insight is correct.

In case you haven’t seen it (left unmentioned in these reports is the fact that the movie got a very big conventional marketing push), here is an “Inglourious Basterds” trailer. And below that, one of my favorite scenes from “Pulp Fiction,” Tarantino’s 1994 breakthrough. (Be warned! These are Tarantino movies, and the second clip is unedited, which means you’re going to get some potentially NSFW cursing and gore. Enjoy!)

But game sales have been weak in 2009, even as movie theaters set box office records. What gives?

I’ll let someone else try to explain the movie side of the ledger (although those box office numbers aren’t always what they seem to be). But it turns out that there’s a simple explanation for game slump: It’s that gamers are huddled in their basements playing Grand Theft Auto over and over and over.

Gamers are indeed spending more time playing videogames, say new data from Nielsen. It’s just that gamers aren’t spending more money on games. Instead, they’re playing the games they have, buying used games, and increasingly turning to game subscription services.

Here’s the argument in chart form–you can get a summary here or download the full report here (PDF). Click on the charts to enlarge:

Hours played:

Used games purchased:

Subscription rate:

All of which explains why Best Buy (BBY) and Wal-Mart (WMT) are both getting into the used game business and why Blockbuster (BBI) and GameFly are expanding their game rental business. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to my game of Hover Kart.

As BoomTown expected, the popularity of the chaste-yet-lustful vampire movie for screaming teen girls everywhere, “Twilight,” has inspired more online video spoofs than you can shake a braided rope of garlic at.

Rabid fans of Stephenie Meyer’s book series flew into theaters all weekend, adding up to a $70.5 million U.S. box office tally so far.

Thus, we are in for more online videos in praise and in mockery of Edward and Bella than perhaps even Alaska Governor Sarah Palin engendered.

Here’s one of the oh-so-serious “Twilight” trailers, followed by one of the better spoofs–by Evil Iguana Productions–below it: