The weekend box office performed astonishingly well over the weekend, especially given the fact that many theaters around the country remained shut on Friday (and, to a lesser extent, on Saturday) due to the blackout. A few films actually performed better on Friday than they did on Saturday. For example, Freddy vs. Jason, the No. 1 film at the box office with a total gross of $36.4 million for the weekend, took in $14.1 million on Friday but $12.8 million on Saturday, a drop of almost 10 percent. Five films earned more than $12 million. The result was that, with total grosses of $142.5 million, the box office outperformed the previous weekend by 34 percent and the year-ago weekend by 28 percent.

The top ten films over the weekend, according to final figures compiled by Exhibitor Relations (figures in parentheses represent total gross to date): 1. Freddy Vs. Jason, New Line, $36,428,066, (New); 2. S.W.A.T. Sony, $18,122,486, 2 Wks. ($69,672,843); 3. Open Range, Disney, $14,047,781, (New); 4. Freaky Friday, Disney, $13,434,285, 2 Wks. ($58,416,557); 5. Uptown Girls, MGM, $11,277,367, (New); 6. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Disney, $9,167,599, 6 Wks. ($248,720,985); 7. American Wedding, Universal, $8,402,760, 3 Wks. ($80,856,345); 8. Seabiscuit, Universal, $8,087,670, 4 Wks. ($83,012,545); 9. Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, Miramax/Dimension, $5,288,540, 4 Wks. ($96,893,935); 10. Bad Boys II , Sony, $3,143,914, 5 Wks. ($128,856,716).

Vivendi Universal refused to disclose Monday whether any of the suitors for its U.S. entertainment holdings had met its minimum asking price of $14 billion. According to published reports, two cash bids were submitted -- one from Liberty Media and another from an investors group headed by Edgar Bronfman Jr. -- as well as NBC's proposal for a merger of assets in return for a minority stake in the merged company that could be sold at a later date. Today's (Tuesday) Los Angeles Times quoted Tod Hullin, a spokesman for the Bronfman group, as saying confidently: "Between us and NBC, they're going to have a clear choice." The Times has previously reported that Vivendi executives felt assured that they would receive at least one bid that would meet their $14-billion minimum.

Presumably unconcerned that releasing tidbits of information about the plot of the upcoming Star Wars: Episode 3 will discourage fans from seeing it, producer Rick McCallum has revealed a number of what the online community calls "spoilers" during a chat with subscribers to the Star Wars: Hyperspace website. Among them: that the film will feature an underwater duel between Ewan McGregor and droids; a scene in which Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader; the meaning of the Darth Vader name (David Prowse, who played Vader in the original trilogy, will not return); there'll probably be a downbeat ending. Meanwhile, the British website itv.com is revealing that Christopher Lee, who plays Count Dooku, dies ten minutes into the opening of the new film. Britain's Guardian newspaper, which published details of the McCallum and ITV stories in today's (Tuesday) editions, commented afterwards, "Watch this space to have the experience of watching the film even more comprehensively ruined over the coming 12 months."

The co-founder of CNN has observed that the cable news network was embarrassed during last week's blackout when its $25 million studio in Manhattan was unable to function -- even as the Fox News studio, three blocks away, was operating on back-up power without a hitch. Writing on his website Reese Schonfeld commented: "For want of a generator, CNN was lost. One would think that if a news company were spending twenty-five million dollars on a new, state-of-the-art, studio and production facility, one would spend the couple of hundred thousand dollars more that it takes to put in a generator. ... CNN spent more money on its sets than it did on its infrastructure. Amateurs, amateurs."

All four network-affiliated stations in Atlanta covering a shootout between a bank robbery suspect and SWAT officers on Monday decided not to show the man being struck by bullets and dying at the scene, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported today. Noting that the coverage appeared to defy the TV maxim "If it bleeds, it leads," the newspaper said that most stations froze the screen either as the alleged robber lifted his gun to fire at the officers or immediately after he fired. Stations then continued to play audio of the gunshots. On the Fox TV station, WAGA, reporter Portia Bruner remarked: "It was quite startling and, to be quite honest, very unpleasant to watch firsthand. ... That's why we are not going to show you exactly how he died." Kurt Davis, a station executive at ABC affiliate WSB, remarked that "in any other market like Miami and L.A., this would be shown full frontal. But that's not what we do here."

Representatives for Doris Roberts and Peter Boyle have denied that the two Everybody Loves Raymond cast members are participating in a sick-out to back fellow cast member Brad Garrett, who is demanding a pay increase. A spokesman for Roberts said that she had been sidelined because of a recent knee injury, and a source close to the show told the Hollywood Reporter on Monday that Peter Boyle had experienced adverse reactions to a prescription drug. (Daily Variety described the illnesses as "awfully coincidental.") Meanwhile, Patricia Heaton has returned to work on the show after another illness, allowing production to resume.

Arab television stations on Monday repeatedly showed the last footage taken by Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana in Iraq as he was shot and killed by U.S. forces on Sunday. The footage shows a tank approaching then firing. The camera, still running, then crashes to the ground. A U.S. Army spokesman said that the soldiers mistook Dana's camera for a grenade launcher. He offered condolences to the cameraman's family. However, a French TV cameraman said that he and other photographers had been in the area for a half hour. "They knew we were journalists. After they shot Mazen, they aimed their guns at us. I don't think it was an accident. They are very tense. They are crazy." In Paris, the international organization Reporters Without Borders demanded that the U.S. launch an investigation that would be "honest, rapid and designed to shed full light on this tragedy."

Sony Pictures Television has completed a pilot for the planned daily eBay TV show, hosted by Ahmad Rashad and Molly Pesce. But the CNN/Money website reported Monday that the show will not be offering items for sale. Instead, officials with eBay and Sony Pictures TV indicated that the show will feature human-interest stories about the people who use eBay to buy and sell. But David Steiner, president of online auction resource Auctionbytes.com, expressed skepticism, telling CNN/Money: "If it's going to just be a marketing tool for eBay, I don't think there will be a lot of interest. I was a TV producer for 15 years. Usually when something takes this long to develop, it means there are a lot of kinks that need to be hammered out. Seeing is believing."

Another website with TV aspirations -- www.thesmokinggun.com -- is being shot at by TV critics. Smoking Gun TV, which debuts on Court TV on Wednesday (the website is owned by the cable TV channel) is being excoriated by at least two of them. Under the heading "A Stench Wafts From This Smoking Gun" Phil Rosenthal, the TV critic for the Chicago Sun Times, concludes: "How ironic that a legal website dedicated to documenting the stupid missteps of others would inspire such a stupid misstep itself." Linda Stasi in the New York Post gets in this blast at Smoking Gun TV: "It's almost impossible to imagine a show as bad as this could have been born from a website as great as that. The only saving grace is that they've cut this dog of a show from a full hour to 30 minutes. Think of the brain cells they've saved." On the other hand, Melanie McFarland, the TV critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, observes, "Smoking Gun TV might be just the ticket to bring more viewers to Court TV."