Attendance picked up on Saturday after a typically slow start to the Labor Day weekend on Friday. George Clooney’s The American was able to pull ahead of fellow newcomer Machete, resulting in a clear weekend win for the understated action movie.

Producer Lionel Wigram looks to breathe new life into Alexandre Dumas’ classic tale The Three Musketeers, just as he did with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, according to Variety. Wigram, who oversaw the first three Harry Potter films at Warner Bros. as a creative executive, will naturally set the film up at WB. Wigram co-wrote and produced Guy Ritchie’s Holmes, and added key elements like Holmes’ skills in hand to hand combat, according to Variety.

For more on the possibility of a franchise and who Wigram has tabbed to sexy up the 17^th century tale, hit the jump.

If the world really does end on December 21, 2012, at least one guy is gonna go out happy. Director Roland Emmerich saw his latest disaster epic rake in an estimated $65 million domestically and over $160 abroad for a grand total of $220 million worldwide. That puts the film in the top ten international launches of all time. I always thought that Sony had made an odd choice by scheduling 2012 for a mid-November release. That’s the time of the year that we usually see more high-brow fare in theatres… and teenaged vampires, of course.  But it looks like the studio knew exactly what they were doing. Not only did 2012 manage to blow away all its early estimates, the tsunami of money the film is surfing this weekend brought a taste of summer blockbuster back to the box office.

It looks like Roland Emmerich had at least one more catastrophic hit left in him. 2012, the latest paean to exploding landmarks from the director of Independence Day, brought in a whopping $23.7 million on its opening day on 3,404 screens. That’s the highest opening ever for Emmerich and it puts 2012 on track for a weekend total of over $55 million – a figure that the box office hasn’t seen since mid-July. Second place went to Disney’s A Christmas Carol, down a reasonable 38% with $5.5 million. And though estimates have The Men Who Stare at Goats barely edging out Lee Daniels’s Precious for Friday’s third place, the momentum is all on the side of the indie sensation. The drama doubled its total gross just one day after expanding into 175 theatres. Check back tomorrow for full details on these films plus news on the box office fate of new releases Pirate Radio and Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

You know it’s the end of the year when there are more new releases per week than any one person could reasonably care about. Or maybe I should just speak for myself.  The first full weekend of November featured four new wide releases all boasting some major star power: “Disney’s A Christmas Carol” with Jim Carrey (times four), “The Box” with Cameron Diaz, “The Fourth Kind” with Milla Jovovich and “The Men Who Stare at Goats” with George Clooney.  And though no one film can be said to be a total washout this weekend, the A-listers fell short compared to the stunningly successful debut of Lee Daniels’ “Precious”. The indie sensation opened in just 18 theatres, taking in an estimated $100,000 per screen to make it the most-lucrative limited release of all-time.

Don’t worry.  It’s okay to laugh.  You don’t need laughs that cut off your ability to breathe nor do you need laughs that are tinged with that magical mixture of horror and schadenfreude.  Sometimes it’s okay to laugh at jokes which you may not remember but come from care-free, silly humor that doesn’t condescend or rely heavily on slapstick.  “The Men Who Stare at Goats” is a fun, enjoyable film that may not cut deep with satire or delve deeply into its bizarre premise, but one which will keep you happy for 93 minutes and leave you smiling.

When you’ve been the number one movie in America and you got there with clever marketing, it was only a matter of time before another movie studio would take aim with a spoof ad.  And that’s exactly what Overture Films has done for “The Men Who Stare At Goats”.  They’ve taken the thirty second “Paranormal Activity” TV commercial and added goats.  Take a look at the spoof after the jump:

Today’s festival titles I doubt could have been any different from one another.  I had a gruesome revenge thriller, goat staring, and something that demands all kinds of adjectives and discussions. Click the jump for Fantastic Fest Day 2, where you can read my reviews for “Hard Revenge Milly: Bloody Battle”, “Antichrist”, and “The Men Who Stare at Goats”. And keep checking back for more coverage of the Austin, TX genre festival.

Like a lot of you guys, “The Men Who Stare at Goats” is now one of my most anticipated films.  I thought the film was going to be about the Iraq war and was just going to star George Clooney, but I admittedly didn’t know anything about the film.  I just wrote it off as another boring Hollywood Iraq war movie.  Then, I saw that oh-so-good trailer the other week and I was sold by the time that I saw George Clooney dissolve a cloud with his mind.  Even though I kind of wish this was actually a documentary, it still looks like a hilarious and fun time to me.  Anyway, the film now has a new poster and you can stare at it when you hit the jump.

We all thought that Ewan McGregor was done with Jedis. He’s spent his time as Obi-Wan, and has since moved on to a myriad of other cinematic pastures – or so we thought. Now he’s back in a new Jedi film, but this isn’t from the mind of George Lucas, and these warriors don’t use light sabers to fight. They use their minds. Read on to learn about “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”

This is how you do a trailer. You take a film that no one’s really been hearing about, and yes, it has stars. You could do a trailer that says “This film has George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, and Jeff Bridges” and just try to sell it mainstream and hope that people will come in based on the names. But instead, this trailer highlights what we love about these actors in the first place and now this film has shot to one of my most anticipated of the year. Hit the jump to find out why.

Two George Clooney movies premiering at this year’s Toronto Film Festival are director Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air” and director Grant Heslov’s “The Men Who Stare at Goats”. Both films have been under the radar as neither has a trailer and I’ve yet to see any movie images.

So when I got my hands on the first images from both films, I figured you’d be as excited as I was to see them. Unfortunately, all I could get was an image of Jason Reitman for “Up in the Air”. He might have been pointing at George Clooney…who knows. However, for George’s other movie “The Men Who Stare at Goats”, I’ve got a great shot. Take a look at both after the jump: