1. Twilight - $70.6 million
Multiplex chains were forced to summon crisis counselors after Twilight's $33 million opening day, the screeching tween torment of which rang in shellshocked staffers' ears even as grosses slowed into the weekend. Meanwhile at Summit Entertainment — the indie that bankrolled the the teen-vampire-romance phenomenon — execs are assembling one of the nicest fruit baskets ever to send to Warner Bros., whose bumping of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from Nov. 21 to next summer gave Twilight a green light to plunder at will.

2. Quantum of Solace - $27.4 million
The 007 thriller plunged 60% from its record-breaking opening a week ago, once again triggering Broody Bond's thirst for revenge that will be explored in the series' stake-wielding 2011 installment, Message For Twilight.

3. Bolt - $27 million
Disney's 3-D canine pseudohero took a massive dump on its owner's carpet over the weekend, underperforming by at least $10 million below expectations. After a stern talking to, the pooch is expected to behave a little better for the studio's Thankgsiving guests; another mess like this and it's straight to the shelter.

4. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa - $16 million
On the other hand, runaway zoo animals never require discipline from their masters at DreamWorks Animation, though Madagascar's own 54% drop was unusual for a famliy film, even one featuring the giraffe-voicing talents of David Schwimmer.

5. Role Models - $7.2 million
David Wain's bid for mainstream success has apparently been accepted by, well, the mainstream, with his R-rated mentoring comedy grossing $48 million to date. Congratulations, David!

1. Quantum of Solace - $70.4 million
Having the playing field all to itself couldn't have hurt the second installment of the Daniel Craig franchise reboot, and it didn't: The broodiest Bond yet earned $70.4 million on approximately 5,900 screens—the highest opening not just of any Bond film, but of any espionage drama in history. Today's trade ads boast Solace's hefty take with the agent screaming in agony as Le Chiffre takes a double-knotted rope to his fourth and fifth digits.

2. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa - $36.13 million
David Schwimmer the Giraffe should enjoy his last hurrah before John Travolta the Spayed German Shepherd bolts in to steal his long-necked thunder.

3. Role Models - $11.71 million
Paul Rudd's SNL hosting triumph only helped boost ticket sales for Role Models, bringing in a contingent of horny Ruddites hoping for an unpixelated glimpse of the goodies, and ended up laughing so hard their eyes bled.

4. High School Musical 3: Senior Year - $5.879 million
If your one excuse for not seeing HSM3 so far was the fact that it features neither Officer John McClane nor the phrase, "Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker!" well, then, you've just run out of excuses:

5. Changeling - $4.247 million
If you haven't yet caught The Changeling, we highly recommend you do. Yes, it will require you overlook star Angelina Jolie's well-documented uncoolness for a couple of hours, but this could well be one the last performances from the actress before she wanders off the Ghanaian sunset three decades from now.

• November 14–16, 2008 [Box Office Mojo]

Then, when pressed by Kimmel about injuries suffered while making the film, Kurylenko one-upped her co-star Gemma Arterton by claiming she lost not just a superfluous sixth finger but a third arm as well! Hmmm, a third arm... there's gotta be a 007 sexual innuendo in there somewhere...

• Jimmy Kimmel Live [ABC]

WHAT'S NEW: Quantum of Solace has the wide-release slot to itself, where Daniel Craig's brooding Bond will likely crest above $60 million — by far the highest opening gross of any 007 film to date. We'll call it for $63.7 million despite some pull from leftovers Madagascar 2 and Role Models, themselves expecting $40 million and $10 million respectively in their second weekends.

Your options are a lot better when avoiding the multiplex in LA: Jean-Claude Van Damme's meta-self-biopic JCVD is opening, along with the almost universally acclaimed Catherine Deneuve/Mathieu Amalric dramedy A Christmas Tale. Also: The Alphabet Killers, featuring Eliza Dushku as a police detective (!); the explicit gay Israeli romantic comedy Antarctica; the talky Afghanistan war indie B.O.H.I.C.A. (Army slang for "Bend Over Here it Comes Again"); the Liberian repression doc Pray the Devil Back to Hell; the Jewish basketball chronicle The First Basket; and a new adaptation of Dalton Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun.

THE BIG LOSER: Aside from the glut of indies above, chasing scraps from art-house audiences on their way to DVD — and Soul Men continuing to underperform with $2.2 million or so — today's slate seems to be pretty insulated from disaster. Everyone wins!

THE UNDERDOG: Trainspotting director Danny Boyle is said to have made the best film of his career with Slumdog Millionaire, about a winning 18-year-old contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Except the host thinks he's cheating; he knows too much for a Mumbai slum kid, and his eventual grilling at the hands of the police reveals a sort of Dickens-meets-Bollywood trajectory of lessons learned, knowledge gained ad love lost throughout his youth. Rhapsodizing critics are pushing it for a Best Picture nomination, which, if the Oscar witches at Fox Searchlight have anything to say about it, it will probably receive. But it will need Little Miss Sunshine/Juno traction at the box office, and on 10 screens this weekend, that would probably mean a per-screen average of at least $12,000 to start. Like its hero, we think it's got a good shot.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include Hellboy II: The Golden Army, the gay Hutt-starring Star Wars: The Clone Wars; Takeshi Miike's mystifying Sukiyaki Western Django; and complete-series box sets of both The Sopranos and The Cosby Show.

So is it Bond or nothing for you? Are you saving seats on the Slumdog Millionaire bandwagon? Or is The Clone Wars badness just too tempting to ignore any longer? Be honest! You're among friends.

Ex-Bond Roger Moore has recently voiced his disappointment over the character's devolution into a monosyllabic id, lumbering around hotel lobbies and breaking necks in skimpy gay swimwear. "My Bond," he said wistfully, "was a lover and a giggler." Yes, we remember him well—so it's in his honor that we dedicate the above montage we call Five Decades of James Bond Sex Puns. We hope it Moonrakes your Octopussies off. (Thanks to Nick McGlynn for putting this together, and Maxim for finding the clips.)

• Previously: Ex-Bond Wishes Daniel Craig Was More of a 'Lover and a Giggler' [Defamer]

In Marc Forster's follow-up to Casino Royale (the new film picks up an hour after the first one ended), death is given no particular extravagance - from when you wake up, wherever you wake up, it's a straight line to the grave, and Bond leaves them where they die in his arms. The muscled bullet of a secret agent tracks the movements of the shadowy Quantum organization, with help and harm from his American friends along the way.

The Bond films routinely have high death counts, but few films in history rank with the frequency and impact of death in Quantum of Solace. More like a Bruce Lee movie than a Michael Bay one, other action films aren't like Quantum: they toy with death, characters threaten each other with it, and near-miss encounters rule the day. In this new world, people really die, and don't come back. Instead of making a joke out of an action film, this Bond turns other action films into jokes by comparison. There's barely a laugh line in the movie, characters rarely smile, and Bond only has sex once. Once!

The film's American contingent is led by the returning Jeffrey Wright, reprising the longtime Bond character of CIA agent Felix Leiter. American agents willingly consort with the film's enemy, Dominic Greene, played by Mathieu Amalric, but they're not all bad, and their motives in the film's conflict are largely unknown until the end.

Tellingly, Leiter gives all the evidence that Bond is his ally — yet he always wisely brings a cavalry of men to run off the harbinger of destruction. It's clear where the Quantum group stands, but whether the events of the film are exactly good or bad for the United States, we're purposefully never told. We just see SWAT teams move in and out of locations, looking for the weapon even they wouldn't know what to do with. Bond might serve the U.S.'s desires, he might not. And just try getting a straight explanation out of him.

Out of multiple shifting alliances and betrayals, Forster makes sense of how difficult that weapon is to control. Quantum of Solace surrounds Bonds with action so fast and furious, you can barely remember where in the world you were last. You're never in America, but the U.S. is with you the whole time, more shadowy and indistinct than any secret organization. If you just pay attention to the action, there's enough to cheer about as Bond commits murder after murder on his way to the truth. But when you look behind the veneer of violence, there's something very sad there indeed.

'I am happy to have done [the series], but I'm sad that it has turned so violent,' Moore says.

'That's keeping up with the times, it's what cinema-goers seem to want and it's proved by the box-office figures,' Moore said in an interview about his memoir, My Word is My Bond.

...While making The Man With the Golden Gun, director Guy Hamilton wanted Bond to be tougher and had him threaten to break Maud Adams' character's arm to get information, he writes.

'I suggested my Bond would have charmed the information out of her by bedding her first. My Bond was a lover and a giggler, but I went along with Guy,' the British actor wrote.

Though Haggis couldn't get the idea of a Bond baby past Daniel Craig, we would have loved to see him pitch a scene where 007 threatens a global supervillain not with a Walther PPK but with an unexpected, high-pitched giggle, eventually capping off Quantum of Solace with a nightgown-clad pillow fight at M's office (oh, the hair-braiding that would ensue!).

[Photo Credit: AP]

• 'James Bond is too violent now,' says former 007 Roger Moore [Daily Mail]

Clearly it depends on whom you ask. By at least one person's standards Batman is already Turkish, and Hancock recently depicted cinema's first drunk, misanthropic superhero as a black dude living on the streets. Global audiences threw $624 million at Will Smith in the latter film, and according to Craig, may be color-blind enough to greet a black Bond with similar largesse:

"After Barack Obama's victory I think we might have reached the moment for a coloured 007. I think the role could easily be played by a black actor, because the character created by Ian Fleming in the '50s has undergone a great deal of evolution and continues to be updated."

Yes, he said "coloured," it's how they roll in the UK, calm down. Craig noted as well that the politically incorrect (at best) Fleming probably wouldn't approve were he alive — a qualification hardly as significant as whether or not viewers who voted in a black president would approve. And even that is an impossible dynamic to parse considering how — if we are the "changed" nation we say we are — Obama's victory owed more to economic and political factors (not to mention pure timing) than the color of his skin. Do we really think we've "reached the moment," or will we only know when the right black Bond comes along?

Beyonce's Wonder Woman scenario is simultaneously simple and more complex. Moviegoers and critics were decidedly stingy to Halle Berry's Catwoman, yielding only $82 million in 2004. Warner Bros., which released Catwoman and whose president Jeff Robinov drew fire last year after allegedly suggesting the studio was done with female leads, has Wonder Woman in limbo (along with Joel Silver) since Joss Whedon abandoned it last year.

So that settled it, we thought, until Beyoncé came along — appropriately Amazonian and looking for her next opportunity coming off her turn as Etta James in the forthcoming Cadillac Records.

"I want to do a superhero movie, and what would be better than Wonder Woman? It would be great. And it would be a very bold choice. A black Wonder Woman would be a powerful thing. It's time for that, right? [...]

"After doing these roles that were so emotional I was thinking to myself, 'OK, I need to be a superhero.' [...] Although, when you think about the psychology of the heroes in the films these days, they are still a lot of work, of course, and emotional. But there's also an action element that I would enjoy."

"It's time for that, right?" Is it? Seriously, we're asking: Is it time for an epochal presidential election to influence Hollywood casting? This town may have helped get Obama elected, but does it have the balls to prove it wasn't a fluke? And are women invited to the party?

• Discuss: Is the World Ready for a Black James Bond? [Cinematical]

• Beyoncé wants to lasso the role of Wonder Woman [Source]

"Haggis had an idea they weren't fond of, and I didn't know if it would work or not," says Forster. "The idea was that Vesper in the last movie, maybe she had a kid, and there would be an orphan out there. It wasn't anything to insult the franchise. But they felt it wasn't particularly Bond — him looking for the kid. I think Paul thought he just leaves the kid, he doesn't deal with it. But [the producers] thought that would be really nasty, too, because Bond was an orphan himself. If he would find a kid, would he just leave it? They were so vehemently against it. That was the only time I saw, really, 'No, we can't do that.' They said, 'Once he finds the kid, Bond can't just leave the kid. It's not right.'"

Could Bond really have weathered the change from secret agent to absentee surrogate father? We have a hard time believing that Bond would lift a finger for a bratty British tyke, but that's OK — his Bond girl has several fingers to spare.

• How James Bond Nearly Became a Father [New York]

Like most people, we have fond memories of the old James Bond. This Bond is not your mother's Bond, however, and he's probably not even your slightly older sister's Bond. Critics have described the new Bond as a more built Jason Bourne, and while that's not going to hurt box office, it certainly constitutes a different bond than the suave, charming Sean Connery and Roger Moore.

From Daniel Craig's interview in this month's Playboy we learn the blame for the new, silent Bond falls on another powerful secret agent. When Craig is asked why Ian Fleming's hilarious double entendres have disappeared, he names the villain:

Craig: Now, a pun's a bad joke. In fact, in this movie we had to be careful of them. They've been sent up in such a way that they almost ring like parody. Austin Powers did them in the extreme. So making a Bond movie, you have to keep that in mind. As soon as you go that way you're making a parody of a parody. It looks like you're doing Mike Myers.
Playboy: Were you cautious of doing Austin Powers?
Craig: Especially when I made the first movie, yes. I had an Austin Powers alarm. On set I'd say, "That's Austin Powers. We can't do it."
Playboy: What set off the Austin Powers alarm?
Craig: There is a chase sequence in the beginning of Casino Royale. I run through a room past 10 workers who are sawing planks. These guys had to look as though they were working; they couldn't just look like guys banging nails. There is an explosion, and they look up. We had to go back to the choreography and make it look real, because at first it looked like Austin Powers.

So James Bond nostalgia '99 killed James Bond nostalgia '08. Groovy.

The Communist Party in St. Petersburg says Olga Kurylenko, the Ukrainian-born model who plays a Bolivian agent in the latest Bond film, "Quantum of Solace," has betrayed her roots.

"In the name of all communists we appeal to you, prodigal daughter of poor Ukraine and deserter of Slavic world," the party said in an open letter dated Oct. 21 and posted on their Web site Friday.

The Soviet Union "gave you free education, free medical care but nobody knew you would commit an act of intellectual and moral betrayal that you would become a movie kept girl of Bond, who in his movies kills hundreds of Soviet people and citizens of other socialist countries: Cubans, Vietnamese, North Koreans, Chinese and Nicaraguans," the party said.

Sergei Malenkovich, head of the party's regional organization, told The Associated Press..."In this movie they wanted to show that a Ukrainian girl sleeps with an American. It's a part of information and psychological war."

Sure, Bond is actually British, not American, but we can understand how a minor detail like that would get lost amidst the waves of devastation and shame washing (equally) over all the deserted Slavs. For her own sake, we hope that Kurylenko will renounce her status as a "movie kept girl of Bond" before she suffers a tragic, 007-worthy fate as her nude body is recovered from the center of a sinister series of Russian nesting dolls.

• Russia communists say Ukraine Bond girl a traitor [Yahoo!]

After the jump: Is it a Dr. No or a Dr. Yes? Chinese weigh in on the new Bond film.

· A&E has picked up a second season of Benjamin Bratt series The Cleaner. [THR]
· The People's Glorious Bureau of Cinematic Cleansing has deemed Quantum of Solace appropriate for Chinese eyes, as the latest Bond film will screen in that country without a single edit. [Variety]

· "It's James Bond, licence to bore....Bond is a boorish oaf who simply rushes from country to country with the manic speed of Jason Bourne, including sequences shot in Panama, Chile, Italy, Mexico and Austria, in a plot about holding a country to ransom over its water supply...Quantum of Solace lacks any wit, ironic or otherwise, which has been a strength of so many 007 films...At around one hour 40 minutes, this Bond is shorter than most. Somehow it felt longer." [Times Online]
· "Quantum Of Solace doesn’t seem like a major entry in the Bond canon. Well under two hours long, it’s shorter and more frenetic than most of its predecessors, and an often-jolting experience to watch. Loose ends about. What it does have, though, above all, is vigour." [The Independent]
· "I was disappointed there was so little dialogue, flirtation and characterisation in this Bond: Forster and his writers Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade clearly thought this sort of sissy nonsense has to be cut out in favour of explosions." [The Guardian]
· "One wonders if director Marc Forster and screenwriters Paul Haggis and Neal Purvis haven't tried a little too hard to distance the film from traditional Bond plots. The expository dialogue scenes can be dull, and cram in so many machinations and double-crossings that it's easy to lose track of who's duping whom." [Telegraph]
· [SPOILERS] "Mostly it doesn't feel like a Bond film at all. Not once does Craig say: "The name's Bond. James Bond." There's no Q or his gadgets. Heck, we even see Bond in a cardigan. There are no risque quips or arched eyebrows. This Bond is a soul in torment having lost the love of his life when Vesper Lynd drowned...It doesn't disappoint - just don't expect the brilliance of Casino Royale. [Daily Mail]
· "The raw nature of the film may put off some who yearn for the days of gizmos, gadgets and Bond quips as he dispenses with faceless opponents...It's a film that feels like the second part of a trilogy, with this being the bleaker second act." [BBC]

The 22-year-old starlet, who plays Agent Fields in the upcoming Quantum Of Solace, admitted she was born with six fingers on each hand.

After undergoing an operation to have them removed, she still has bumpy scars as remainders of her extra digits.

The extra fingers were 'tied', which causes them to fall off naturally.

She tells Esquire magazine: 'It's my little oddity that I'm really proud of. It makes me different.'

Earlier this year, she revealed she was also born with a crumpled ear, which was corrected through surgery.

She said: 'I was born with lots of deformities.'

Whatever surgical adjustments Arterton required were a smashing success, as the actress bears almost no resemblance to the duodenary-digited, crumple-eared duckling she was in her youth. Still, our minds can't help but wander to the alternate outcome, and the dazzling possibilities of Bond's deadly Secret Service associate 0012—the only agent capable of typing the nuclear-dismantling codes into the evil Dr. Oilhoarder's [caution: link contains spoiler] supercomputer fast enough to avoid the obliteration of Western Europe.

• 'I was born with six fingers on each hand' reveals Bond Girl Gemma Arterton in startling interview [Daily Mail]

[Daily Mail]

[via Neatorama]

Asked if he agreed with fans who have laughed at the new name, Craig told GQ: "No, because I was involved in making the decision. Names were coming out, some ludicrous stuff was going back and forth – I can't remember exactly, but you know the sort of thing: 'The Blood On Your Face'. I knew I didn't want 'death', 'die', 'bleed' or any of those things in the title.

"We had it written down on boards and we'd literally go and sit in rooms and stare at this title. If you look at 'Q's, they're really weird in a title.

"As soon as it came out, people were saying, 'Ooh, it sounds like Harry Potter.' No, it's Quantum of Solace. I was saying, 'It's a Bond title! The name of a Bond film is not about anything. Live And Let Die? Octopussy? What does it mean? It means very little. We've got nothing to worry about."

Though we mourn the loss of the producer-suggested title You Only Bleed When You Die From Death, we have to agree with Craig that the Bond names typically mean very little (and that Q's are totally rad!). Still, why didn't the star insist on his perilous title's incorporation into the film's theme song? Jack White yowling words that rhyme with "solace" might have provided the Bond theme with the frisson it so desperately needed — or at least a great many more lines about undersung Kojak star Telly Savalas.

[Photo Credit: AP]

• Daniel Craig: Bond film name Quantum of Solace was my idea [Telegraph]

• Jack White slams Coca-Cola for using James Bond song [NME]