This week sees the release of several new movies and TV shows, some for the first time ever on Blu-ray. Of the ones coming out this week, we’re excited for Ninja Assasin, new seasons of Hawaii Five-O, Monk, and South Park and the Blu-ray release of The Wizard of Oz 70th Anniversary Edition.

Oh, and there’s that Twilight movie coming out on Blu-ray this week you may have heard of. I think its called New Moon.

Check them out:

Movies

Armored ~ Matt Dillon, Laurence Fishburne (Blu-ray and DVD)

Astro Boy ~ Nicolas Cage (Blu-ray and DVD)

Bandslam ~ Vanessa Hudgens (Blu-ray and DVD)

Broken Embraces ~ Penélope Cruz (Bl-ray and DVD)

Did You Hear About the Morgans? ~ Sarah Jessica Parker, Hugh Grant (Blu-ray and DVD)

Fallen Angels ~ Leon Lai Ming, Karen Mok (Blu-ray and DVD)

Overall, it was a pretty quiet weekend at the box office for Hollywood. Invictus and The Princess and the Frog were new releases vying for the top spot, and Disney’s Princess easily won. Princess made about $25 Million on 3400+ screens.  This is good news for fans of hand drawn animation, as this is the first time Disney returned to the method since 2004, when Home on the Range was released.

It’s been all computer generated ever since. I haven’t seen Princess, but people I’ve talked to really liked the look of the movie, and said it looked like the older Disney movies. The Blind Side also continues to impress, and came in at number two with $15.4 Million.

In its fourth week of release, it only dropped 22% from last week. It now has a domestic gross of over $150 Million. With a budget of around $30M, this movie is shaping up to be one of the biggest hits this year.

Invictus made a paltry $9 Million over the weekend. Considering the star power (Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman) and the director (Clint Eastwood), I think everyone expected this movie to perform better. Critical and audience feedback has been positive, so perhaps it will pick up a bit.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon placed fourth, with about $8 Million, bringing its domestic total to over $267 Million. In fifth place, A Christmas Carol only dropped 11% from last weekend, and made about $6.8 Milion. Now in its sixth week of release, the movie continues to perform , but it has not yet recouped its budget of $200 Million.

Holdovers Brothers, 2012, Old Dogs, Armored, and Ninja Assasin rounded out the top ten. Outside of the top ten, Up In The Air also did very well, making $2.4 Million on only 72 screens for an average of $34,000 per screen. The film will roll out more theaters next weekend.

While Twilight was a guilty pleasure, its sequel New Moon just made me feel guilty. Guilty for paying a sitter, guilty for the gas I wasted, and guilty for buying into the Twilight phenomenon to begin with. A wretched excursion into franchise baiting, New Moon is flat out an embarrassment for everyone involved.

Briefly, if you don’t know the story of the sequel, Bella Swan is a mortal in love with a vampire, Edward Cullen. Towards the beginning of New Moon, Edward realises that it is too dangerous for Bella to continue seeing him, so he pretends that he doesn’t love her anymore and disappears. Bella behaves like a petulant infant and doesn’t leave her room for months because she is a narcissistic, co-dependent teenager.

When she finally emerges after months of alienating friends and family, she sidles up to Jacob, a local boy of Native American descent, who also is a werewolf. Bella then becomes co-dependent on Jacob, because that is what she does. She also becomes a thrill seeker, because whenever she endangers her life (via cliff diving, motorcycling, etc) she sees a floating spectre of Edward pleading for her to quit engaging in said risky behavior. In her melodramatic mind, this is how she can be close to her beloved Edward, if only for a second. That’s a healthy depiction of true love, right?

Twilight author Stephenie Meyer’s movie machine keeps humming along as another of her novels has been grabbed by producers Nick Wechsler, Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz. The trio, fresh from adapting Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to the big screen, reportedly used their own funds to acquire Meyer’s The Host, her first adult novel. In addition, the producers have tapped Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, The Truman Show) to pen the script and direct.

In case you’re only familiar with Meyer’s Twilight novels, The Host follows a similar pattern and is a bittersweet love story set in a near future Earth which has been assimilated by an alien species of benevolent parasites. These creatures call themselves “Souls.” One such soul, the Wanderer, is fused with a dying human named Melanie Stryder, in an attempt to locate the last pocket of surviving humans on Earth.

According to the report, Meyer had, in the past, refused all offers to bring The Host to the big screen. But apparently, these producers came to the table with the right combination of deal and vision for the project which finally made her agree. Having never read The Host, nor any of the Twilight novels, all I can say is this must be good news for those of you who have. Judging from fan’s reaction to those books and films, I have little doubt The Host will meet with similar success — especially if the film somehow features Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.

Summit releases the second adaptation of Meyers’ vampire series, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, on Nov. 20.

As sometimes happens when fans of a film are as fanatical as those who love The Twilight Saga are, trailers and other promotional materials tend to get “leaked” online before their official premieres. Once again, it has happened with the latest trailer for the upcoming The Twilight Saga: New Moon — now featuring, as the embedded link points out: “no fan girl screaming.” Thank goodness for that.

In this new trailer we get a lot of the familiar stuff fans of these films know and love: Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner and lots of fighting, skin, sad faces, teen angst and the first real glimpse of the fabled Volturi. In other words, the trailer is everything you can hope for and more — especially if you’re a big fan of these books and movies.

Check out the trailer after the break. Of course, as if you didn’t already know, The Twilight Saga: New Moon hits theaters on November 20th. That’s only 67 days away. Don’t worry, you can make it.

Here it is folks, the brand new trailer for the upcoming sequel to Twilight, known to all fans as The Twilight Saga: New Moon. In this one we get a lot more insight into Taylor Lautner’s character and the trailer actually plays more like a mini-featurette rather than an actual trailer. Its all Lautner all the time and that makes sense.

If you recall Lautner’s character Jacob Black was a relatively minor presence in the first film. Now that he’s in the spotlight and part of the new New Moon love triangle, the sudience needs to know more about where he’s coming from. We already know Robert Pattinson’s Edward and Kristen Stewart’s Bella very well at this point so its logical to want to feature more about the new hunk on the block or, um, in the forest.

Check out the new trailer after the jump. The Twilight Saga: New Moon, hits theaters on November 20th.

And you thought nothing cool ever happens on Mondays.

Reporting from Comic-Con, SciFiWire revealed that star Taylor Lautner spoke about his transformation into a werewolf during the press conference for The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the sequel to the mega-hit Twilight.

Readers of the Twilight series already know what is in store for Jacob this time around, even though his part was minimal in the first film. (Spoiler alert ahead!) Lautner marveled at his “wolf out” transformation from the second film.

“I thought they did a pretty good job with the wolf transformation,” Lautner told reporters. “I’m excited that there are werewolves involved now, because the werewolves definitely step up the action in the movie. There’s double the action in this movie than there was before.”

Although Visual-effects wizards handle the heavy lifting on werewolf transformation, Lautner had to buff out for the role. Early rumors even suggested recasting for a bulkier actor, but Lautner refused to let the part slip away from him.

“I knew when I was filming Twilight that Jacob’s character changed a lot, so if I wanted to continue portraying him directly,” Lautner continued. “I had a lot of work ahead of myself.”

One of the things you see at Comic-Con in San Diego are celebrities. One such celebrity is Taylor Lautner, who plays Jacob in the The Twilight Saga: New Moon.

Another thing that’s fun about Comic-Con is hanging around backstage and trying to catch a glimpse of people like Lautner. Fortunately, that’s just what happened today. He was just finishing up some interviews and decided to pause for a fe minutes right in front of me. Naturally, I took some photos.

Check out the bigger photos after the jump. Twilight: New Moon hits theaters November 20.

I realize its been at least a few days since we had anything here about Twilight, so in order to not further disappoint fans of Stephanie Meyer’s creation, I’ve got some new info for you right now. This time around, as first announced by The Flickcast friends MTV’s Splashpage, the long-anticipated Manga adaptation of the Twilight saga will finally, um, see the light of day from Yen Press.

According to the site, Twilight is “officially” coming to comics but sadly, at least for fans of the films, you won’t be treated to super-realistic versions of Meyer’s characters taken directly from the movies. Instead, “certain” features unique to Twilight and The Twilight Saga: New Moon actors such as Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart will influence the drawings by Korean artist Young Kim. Although I’ll bet even though the intent is not to make the characters in the Manga look exactly like the movie’s actors, it will end up looking a lot like them once the Manga is released.

But don’t worry, even if the artist does stray away from the actor’s likenesses, the Manga will still have the Twllight seal of approval because Meyer will oversee every panel and detail of the project. Based on the story’s description in the article, it seems the Manga will be a straight adaptation of the existing stories, which makes sense and is probably the easiest to do. Also, there’s no word yet on how many books are currently planned but be sure if it sells well (and it will) there will be a bunch of them.

Its too bad they don’t have this ready now and can sell copies at next week’s Comic-Con in San Diego right after the Twilight panel finishes up in Hall H. If they did have the Manga ready, you can be sure they would sell every single copy and probably have hundreds of back orders as well.