With the movie business seeing record box office in the form of James Cameron’s Avatar, another business that used to also be thought of as pretty successful seems to have stalled a bit last year. According to Variety, the video game business saw an overall fall in sales of 8% with revenues of $19.7 Billion last year.

That’s down from $21.4 billion in 2008, according to the NPD Group, a company that keeps track of this sort of thing. The industry was expected to take a hit after only four months last year saw an increase in sales over 2008. One of those months, however, was December.

The videogame industry’s $5.5 Billion take in December was the biggest sales month ever, beating the previous year by 4%. Nintendo’s “New Super Mario Bros. Wii” was the winner of the month, selling over 2.8 Million units. Nintendo also sold 3.8 Million Wii consoles during December thanks largely to a price cut on the popular device.

Cost reductions also helped Sony sell 1.4 million PlayStation 3′s and Microsoft to move 1.3 million Xbox 360s. For the year every videogame category experienced a decline aside from sales of portable hardware, up 6%. Console sales were off 13%, and software sales for PC games took an even bigger hit, with earnings down 23% to $538 Million in 2009.

Even with the drop in sales last year, let’s try not to feel too bad for the video game industry. Even though the made 8% less money in 2009, they still managed to rack up $19.7 Billion dollars. That’s a lot of Mountain Dew and salty snack foods.

Despite Tobey’s dropping that he knows who will be replacing Sam Raimi as director for the planned Spider-Man4 movie reboot, the bigger news surrounding the Golden Globe nominee has been a rumor fueled by the entire internet that he’s currently signed on to play Bilbo Baggins in Guillermo del Toro’s The Hobbit.

But word has come from the Headgeek over at Ain’t It Cool News, via email from del Toro and Peter Jackson who is stepping back to the role of Producer for the two films being made from J.R.R. Tolkien’s lead-in to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, that the rumors aren’t true and that the production is still about a month or two away from making any announcements. Peter Jackson, in his email response even said that they’re  ”currently auditioning for Bilbo.”

Will this mean that in a month or so we’ll be completely shocked at who gets the role? Or might Maguire actually have a shot at it and the filmmakers are just playing coy? Let us know what you think of this idea, or who you’d like to see as Bilbo, in the comments below.

Even with the holiday today comics will still come out this Wednesday, so don’t worry. This week, as they usually do, the folks at marvel have some brand new books to share with us. Of the new releases, we’re particularly excited about the latest Uncanny X-Men, a new Captain America, Dark Avengers #13 and Wolverine Weapon X.

Be sure to check out previews of covers for some of these comics after the jump.

Comics On-Sale:
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #618 (GNTLT)
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #618 QUINONES VARIANT (GNTLT)
AVENGERS VS. ATLAS #1
AVENGERS VS. ATLAS #1 HARDMAN VARIANT
BLACK WIDOW & THE MARVEL GIRLS #3
CAPTAIN AMERICA #602
DARK AVENGERS #13 (S)
DARK WOLVERINE #82 (S)

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The CW (Formerly UPN and The WB) has managed to latch on to some strong properties over the years, while of course picking up a few new ones, such as Gossip Girl. One of the original series’ that seems to stay strong, even in it’s fifth season, is Supernatural.

This season, thing seem to get a bit more interesting as the show attempts some risky episode scripts. Back in November, the “Changing Channels” episode had the two brothers flipping into different fictitious TV shows, which were basic spoofs of the other shows in Supernatural’s timeslot.

This week it seems that they’ll be taking a page from the book of Buffy, as Sam and Dean get locked up in an insane asylum. From Warner:

SAM & DEAN LOCKED UP IN THE NUTHOUSE?! – Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) go undercover at a mental institution in response
to a distress call from Martin Creaser, a former hunter (guest star Jon Gries) who’s a patient there.  Creaser thinks supernatural forces may be the real reason behind a large number of patient suicides and is afraid for his own life, but the experience proves to be a very dangerous one for the Winchester brothers as well.

Check out two brand-new clips from “Sam, Interrupted” after the jump. Be sure to catch this week’s episode Of Supernatural on Thursday at 9:00pm ET/PT on The CW.

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Jim Carrey’s career has been on the upswing lately. From hitting with the success of Yes Man to playing just about every character in Disney’s A Christmas Carol, he’s had a good year, and he plans to continue that with the new comedy I Love You Philip Morris.

From the writing/directing team of John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (Bad Santa, Bad News Bears), the film stars Carrey as Steven Russel, a conman who recently discovers his own homosexuality. Russel gets incarcerated for his crime and meets Philip Morris (Ewan McGregor), who he then falls in love with. Things then become zany as the film turns the Romantic Comedy on it’s head.

The movie will most certainly turn heads, as this is one of the first mainstream comedies to boast the flamboyancy of male homosexuality (outside of I Love You Man dancing around the subject). Lots of interesting tones that the film deals with, which you can catch a glimpse of in the trailer after the jump.

I Love You Philip Morris also stars Leslie Mann, and is hitting a theater near you on March 26th.

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Today, one of our favorite companies (Apple, if you couldn’t guess) sent out invites to an event next week on January 27th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In the invitation, the company cryptically says, “Come see our latest creation.” Cool. We hope its the long-rumored tablet, but you never know. Based on the look of the invite it might just be a great new paint application.

It’s going to be a crazy day since so much anticipation and hype has been building for an Apple tablet and the room will probably explode if Apple doesn’t announce one. Still, with all the things going on in the world, it’s nice to see a company that’s able to suprise people now and then.

Although the company’s near-obsession with security may annoy some, it’s sometimes okay not to know everything that’s going on all the time. Surprises are actually nice sometimes.

The event starts at 10 AM Pacific so be sure to check in right here at The Flickcast for all the scoop.

Once again, the country has been split. This time, it’s not for for land, democracy, money, or rap music, but the coveted prize of NBC’s The Tonight Show. The country’s sides are broken down to “Team Conan” and “Team Leno.” Though the latter should be “Team NBC”, nobody wants to take sides with the network after the decisions they’ve made.

Of course there are people who remain independent, or on “Team Dave”, but they don’t really matter here. With NBC announcing that their letting Conan go, fellow celebrity supporters of O’Brien are standing up and taking as many potshots at the network as they can on national TV. One of those supporters is Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers.

Meyers is not only the first solo host of Weekend Update since Colin Quinn back in 2000, but he’s also the show’s current head writer. Meyers took a moment to explain the “Late Night War” in a pretty marital analogy for everyone to understand, which both enlightened us, and stuck it to NBC CEO Jeff Zucker at the same time. Take a look at the clip after the jump.

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The 67th annual Golden Globes awards took place last night, and Avatar walked away top honors of  Best Picture and Best Director, fueling speculation that it is gaining momentum going into the Oscar nomination race. Avatar and Crazy Heart picked up two awards each, but there were no lopsided wins this year.

Critical darling The Hurt Locker was shut out and went home empty handed.  The Hurt Locker has been cleaning up top honors at Critic Circle awards nationwide. Up in the Air was nominated for six awards, but only won for Best Screenplay.

Veteran actors Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep won acting awards, and delivered particularly elegant and classy acceptance speeches.

On the television side, Dexter fared well, with John Lithgow and Michael C. Hall both winning acting awards.  HBO’s film Grey Gardens won two awards as well.  Mad Men won for Best Television Series, Drama and freshman series Glee won for best Television Series, Comedy or Musical.

A complete list of winners follows. Also, be sure to check out our photo gallery of all the winners after the jump.

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Saturday morning I thought that The Book Of Eli might actually pull off the feat of toppling the unstoppable Avatar, because it did lead the box office on Friday. Well, close, but no cigar. Avatar reigned supreme once again, and made an astonishing $41.3 Million in its 6th week of release, and it is still playing on over 3,000 screens.

Avatar has now surpassed Star Wars as the number three highest grossing movie of all time with a cumulative total of $491 Million. The Dark Knight stands at number two, with $533 Million.

The Book of Eli had a pretty decent showing, with $31.6 Million on just over 3,000 screens. If the movie gets good word of mouth, it should do well in upcoming weeks. In third place was The Lovely Bones, which fared better than I thought it would. It was postponed from last year, and has received somewhat of a critical drubbing, but it still managed $17.1 Million.

In my opinion, this is a testament to how much readers loved the book. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, hung around and made $11.5 Million for fourth place. The movie is closing in on $200 Million, as it now stands at $192 Million.

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SciFi Wire has an interview with Chi McBride, who played Emerson Cod in the tragically cancelled show, and in it the actor says Bryan Fuller, the creator of Pushing Daisies, is currently hard at work on scripting the graphic novel that will carry on the story of the Pie Maker and his magical reanimating finger.

McBride, who was promoting his new role in the comic-adapted series Human Target, says that he’s seen some of the pages for the book, and that it’s “off the hook.”

“It’s a whole thing about a whole bunch of corpses coming to life,” said McBride. He also indicated the tone of the book will be darker and edgier than what could be done on primetime-mainstream television. McBride also dded his enthusiasm for seeing the project continued not only for his own satisfaction, but to also reward the loyal fans.

Pushing Daisies, which was executive produced by Barry Sonnenfeld (The Addams Family, Men In Black), was aired for two seasons on ABC before having the plug pulled for low ratings and high-production costs — despite it’s positive critical and fan response. The show also starred Lee Pace, Anna Friel, Swoosie Kurtz, and Kristin Chenoweth.

There’s few other details about the book currently but when it comes out I’ll definitely pick it up.

The buzz has only been getting louder since the first trailer for Joe Carnahan’s The A-Team hit a few weeks ago. The first glimpses of the TV-to-film remake split fans, as some were excited, and some annoyed. Thankfully, most of us around The Flickcast offices are excited, and even more so when six new stills from the film got released.

The film looks to have all the excitement we remember from the original series, and then some. Carnahan is known for his explosive and “in your face” directing style, which is exactly what this property would need in order to do it justice.

Check out these all new images from the film after the jump, starring Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Sharlto Copley, “Rampage” Jackson, and Jessica Biel. The A-Team is set for a June 11th release date.

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Welcome to our very first live-blogging event on The Flickcast. If you are not familiar with live-blogging, basically it is a running commentary that you will be able to see in real-time.  Staff writers Elisabeth Rappe, Cortney Zamm,  John Muth, and myself (Shannon Hood) will be your commentators this evening.  In order to see the latest comments, scroll down throughout the evening, and refresh your browser often.

If you have any comments to make during the ceremony, feel free to use our comments section at the end of the post.  Now, let’s talk Golden Globes!

So our first arrival that we will comment on is….Fergie.

Shannon 6:05  It looks like Fergie is pregnant or had some work done

John 6:06 I guess it’s kind of inconsiderate to be like, “so Fergie, you going to have a little Gremlin soon?”

John 6:09 January Jones didn’t look that great…Whoa, but Marion Cottiard…

Shannon 6:09 She looks gorgeous. Very stunning.

John 6:10  NO!!! Ask about Inception!!! Dammit!

Cortney 6:10 Cannot wait for that movie. I have no idea what it’s about, but I’m excited.

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