The biggest movie star in the world has another July 4th notch in his belt. His fourth huge Independence Day release (fifth if you count Wild Wild West, which came out June 30th) is also his biggest: the outrageously underappreciated Hancock had a $66 million 3-day weekend, and $107 million over the five-and-a-half days from Tuesday night through Sunday. It's the third-best 3-day of the year, behind only Iron Man and Indiana Jones. The figure is skewed since the movie came out on Tuesday and Friday was a national holiday, but that's the stat.

The wide release of the critically acclaimed Kit Kittredge: An American Girl didn't go over too well: the movie took in $3.6 million on over 1800 screens. Not too surprising given its extremely narrow target demographic, but I was expecting it to expand a little bit stronger.

Wall-E took a pretty harsh 47% hit in its second weekend -- 30-40% has been more standard for recent Pixar releases -- but its $128 million cume is nothing to cry about. Wanted had it even worse after last week's surprisingly robust debut, dropping 60% to $20.6 million for the weekend and $91 million total. And no one wants to see The Love Guru, which dropped out of the top 10 in its third week and won't make it to $40 million.

The full 3-day top 10 after the jump.

Can you make a summertime movie that gives audiences excitement, adventure and real drama -- and still have it flop? Are Hancock's reviews missing the big picture? And does the success of Sex and the City mean that the niches of movie marketing are going to get even more narrow? Joining us this week to talk about all these topics and more is David Poland, editor-in-chief of Movie City News and author of The Hot Blog. Cinematical's podcast is now available through iTunes; you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below:



As ever, you can download the entire podcast right here -- and those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.

This one's a little heartwarming, folks, especially if you're predisposed (as I am) to admiring pretty much everything about the Pixar company.

Last fall, a young woman named Courtney saw the WALL-E teaser -- the one where Andrew Stanton talks about the meeting in 1994 where the story was first conceived -- and was reduced to a puddle of tears by its adorableness. Seems she has a soft spot for robots, and in particular for lonely, child-like, wide-eyed robots. So she videoed herself watching the trailer on her computer, knowing it would have the same effect on her again, and then she posted the video on her blog and on YouTube. (We've got it here after the jump.)

The video made its way around the Internets, as these things do, and Courtney began to get e-mails from people within the Pixar family who had seen it and appreciated her enthusiasm. Then one of the film's producers sent her a Pixar jacket as a Christmas gift, along with a note thanking her for the video.

And then they invited her to the film's wrap party in San Francisco.

The media is playing two pointless games of "gotcha" with Pixar's wonderful Wall-E at the moment. Eric Kohn addressed the first -- conservative critics griping about the film's "left-wing" message -- over here. The other, best articulated in this post by CHUD's Devin Faraci and this mind-boggling missive from the New York Post's Kyle Smith, but also showing up in Todd McCarthy's Variety review, is that Wall-E's supposed anti-consumerist bent is "hypocrisy" on account of it's released by Disney. I think that's a stupid and dishonest argument, and here's why.

In its latter half, Wall-E presents a vision of the future in which humanity is fat, lazy, basically immobile but for their hoverchairs, and in thrall to a mega-corporation called Buy 'N Large that tells everyone what to do, what to think, and what to buy. The rest of the film is dedicated to Wall-E, EVE, and the spaceship Axiom's human population defying the corporation and returning back to Earth to recolonize. This is disingenuous, the thinking goes, because the Disney empire bears more than a few similarities to Buy 'N Large and, in fact, cynically counts on unthinking, overweight masses, to see its movies, buy its merchandise, and ride the rides at Disney World.

What you'll notice from the folks making this argument is a coy ambiguity about who exactly is being hypocritical here. If the claim is that Disney is being hypocritical by releasing Wall-E, then that may well be right -- but it's also not surprising, newsworthy, or even worth mentioning. Is anyone really shocked that a large, profit-seeking corporation is being opportunistic and ideologically inconsistent? Where is all the outrage about Disney flicks that push the individuality and non-conformism message, when the Walt Disney Company is dependent on a herd mentality among its consumers?

Notwithstanding the best attempts of some to smear Wall-E as being somehow hypocritical or disdainful of consumers, the little robot gave Pixar the third-best opening weekend in its history, behind The Incredibles and Finding Nemo (and roughly tied with Monsters, Inc.). Its $62.5 million take was on par with expectations, though the lack of the usual family film Saturday and Sunday bump suggests that Wall-E attracted an impressive number of kidless Friday night moviegoers. And that bodes well for the weeks to come: the movie is quite sophisticated and not all that toddler-friendly, so word-of-mouth among adults will be key.

Given Wall-E's apparent cross-demographic appeal, one might have expected Wanted to struggle a bit as the weekend's "adult counterprogramming," but nothing doing: at $51.1 million and a strong second place, we may have a new franchise on our hands. The two combined to make this the strongest three-day weekend of the summer at the box-office overall; in fact, to find a higher combined top 12 gross, we have to go back to Memorial Day 2007 and the debut of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

The rest of the chart looks unremarkable. The Love Guru dropped almost 61% to 6th place, prompting the unsurprising conclusion that the Guru Pitka didn't connect with summer audiences. The Incredible Hulk continues to run behind Hulk, ruling out the possibility that it will have the staying power to do appreciably better than the embattled 2004 film. Wall-E gave Kung Fu Panda its first significant hit, dropping it to 4th place. Indiana Jones will break $300 million by the end of Monday, if Sunday's final numbers don't push it past the milestone. And The Happening looks like it will top out around $70 million.

The full numbers after the jump.

The numbers are in, and both Wall·E ($62.5 million) and Wanted ($51.1 million) absolutely rocked the box office this weekend. We'll save the full report for tomorrow morning, but we here at Cinematical wanted to know what you thought of each film. A Cinematical poll last week -- asking which movie you planned on seeing over the weekend -- showed that 40% of you were interested in watching both flicks. Since these are two completely different movies, we're not asking which one you liked better (though feel free to offer up that info). Instead, what did you think of each?

How does Wall·E stack up against the previous Pixar efforts? Was it better than Toy Story or The Incredibles? (Speaking of, don't forget to vote in our Best Pixar film poll, which currently has The Incredibles kicking total ass.) What about Wanted? Did it rock your socks? Or did style get in the way of substance? Sound off below ...

A couple of people have been griping about Wall-E director Andrew Stanton's refusal to admit that his cute little movie about a robot in love actually contains some pretty upfront green politics, but there's a far more polarizing reference in the film than its harmless pro-environment agenda. It's no major plot spoiler to reveal that, about an hour or so into the story, Fred Willard appears in a recorded message as the mysterious president of Earth's corporate government and orders the ship's captain (Jeff Garlin) to "stay the course." Wait, we've heard this one before: It was the go-to statement used by the Bush administration for about three years or so when describing its modus operandi in Iraq (the term was abandoned when staying the course started to sound like a bad idea). In Wall-E, the context is quite different -- it's an order to not do something, rather than take action -- but hard to ignore nonetheless.

Certain critics with (surprise!) conservative slants have taken issue with this. At Dirty Harry's Place, John Nolte expresses his disappointment in the first paragraph of his review: "Have we lost the wonderful studio who brought us The Incredibles and Ratatouille to Bush Derangement Syndrome?" he asks. New York Post critic Kyle Smith picked up the rant and decided to write his own, even though he hadn't seen the film yet: "This kind of crack, lame as it is, also breaks the spell of the movie by hurling you out of the theater and back into reality."

" ... and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place."

-- Horace Smith, Ozymandias

WALL-E, from Pixar studios, shows us a ruined city, centuries from now, where a single (and singular) robot toils to cube trash and, it seems, will never lack for work. WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter (Earth-Class)), a two-treaded solitary worker robot, spends his days cubing trash and his nights shut in safe from the cataclysmic garbage-gales that sweep the planet, inside a repair truck he's filled with things that have fascinated him; garden gnomes, butane lighters, a copy of Hello, Dolly! And in WALL-E's nearly-silent opening minutes, we get a sense of the world he lives in. Everything is ruined; there are no signs of life but for cockroaches; the only voices you hear come when the motion-activated Buy 'n' Large holo-billboards go off. WALL-E strips his broken-down brethren for parts and recharges by the sun's rays and stacks trash-cubes to imitate the skyscrapers decaying all around him, garbage as a pale reflection of glory.

Unlike last week's double dose of the funny, this weekend we're dealing with two completely different flicks. One is a light, breezy, beautiful Pixar animated effort, while the other is a wham-bam-boom, guns drawn, bullets flying, sexy, adrenaline-fueled action pic. Good news is the buzz on both films is pretty damn good. Personally, I've only seen WALL·E, and it's definitely one of my favorite films of the year so far. But you have to be the sorta person who digs Pixar. I know grown adults who can't stand watching animated feature films. That might be you. I happen to really enjoy them, as does my wife, and so we had a blast with it. Read my review. Maybe it'll help sway your decision.

On the other hand, Wanted looks to be the flick for those in need of a big-screen rush. It comes highly-stylized and proud to be rated R. Did we mention that Angelina Jolie still looks sexy as all hell? In his review from the Los Angeles Film Festival, James said, "Wanted's a corporate product, but, thankfully, it's an excellent one -- the two-fisted, double-barreled high-octane guilty pleasure summer action movie you've been waiting for." Couldn't have summed it up better myself. But which one are you seeing? Both? Neither? Something else entirely? Sound off below ...

It's hundreds of years from now, practically no life (save for a cockroach) remains on the giant garbage dump that's become Earth, and, funnily enough, the only remaining sign of humanity can be found inside the planet's last functional robot: a trash collector (and compactor) named WALL·E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class). It's been roughly 700 years since humans last populated Earth, and in that time WALL·E has wasted away doing what he was originally programmed for: collect, compact and pile trash so that it's out of the way.

However, over the years WALL·E has managed to develop a bit of OCD, collecting certain items and methodically storing them in the large metal container he calls home. One day, while out searching for more trash (and knickknacks), a spaceship arrives to drop off another robot -- one whose mission it is to scour the area and search for life. And it's a girl ... named EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator).

Thus begins what is perhaps Pixar's most romantic film yet -- a beautiful sci-fi tale complete with all the feel-good vibes and fantastic, cutting-edge visuals we've come to expect from a film wearing the Pixar name. Despite a few small bumps in the galaxy, WALL·E can easily claim a spot up top on a list featuring the best films of the year so far, and it will surely go down as one of Pixar's most memorable -- because it's also one of their most personal.