Sometimes bad breaks can bring great fortune. A few years ago, Peter Jackson, the Lord of the Rings movies, planned a big-screen version of the Halo video-game universe and tapped Neill Blomkamp to direct it. When that project collapsed after a few months, Jackson proposed that Blomkamp turn his science-fiction short Alive in Joburg into his first feature film. It would be set in Blomkamp's native South Africa, focus on the country's traumatic tradition of apartheid, have characters who ...

North American movie theaters served as the field of combat for two action figures from '60s TV: the Hasbro toy soldier G.I. Joe and the animated "French chef" Julia Child. The raw box-office count suggests an overwhelming victory for the would-be blockbuster. Behind the numbers, though, was evidence of a standoff, with each side able to claim victory. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra took in $56.2 million, according to ...

Draco Malfoy and the slimy kids of Slytherin couldn't have wreaked more damage on Harry Potter than a bunch of commando guinea pigs did to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince this weekend. G-Force, the live-action and CGI action comedy, earned $32.2 million this weekend at the North American box office, besting the $30 million take of the sixth Potter film, according to the usual movie-studio estimates of the weekend frame. Final numbers are posted Monday. G-Force was ...

The wise old men and their young colleagues gave the world all the entertainment it needed this weekend. While 59-year-old, self-proclaimed "geezer" golfer Tom Watson mounted a heroic effort to win the British Open, only to fall short in a four-hole playoff against a much younger rival, that great gray sorcerer Albus Dumbledore led Harry Potter to the biggest opening for any film in the series. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will have taken in nearly $80 million ...

A former New York City art gallery owner already facing a 100-count indictment was indicted again Tuesday for allegedly defrauding his clients for $5 million, the Manhattan District Attorney's office said in a statement. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" -- the sixth movie in the series based on J.K. Rowling's seven Harry Potter books -- had more than 2,700 sold-out screenings, according to MovieTickets.com. The film had more than 1,500 midnight screening sellouts in the United States and finished ...

Entering his sixth year at Hogwarts, Harry Potter may not be able to see the finishing line, but he knows it's coming. In "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the sixth film in the Potter series, he's like a marathon runner who senses that he's got this course beat: He's still pacing himself, but there's a definite spring in his step. Potter's confidence seems to be a product of Daniel Radcliffe's authority in the role as much as anything. ...

The mood is dark. Death Eaters blight the skies, sent on their sorties by the fiendish Lord Voldemort, and in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a grim fate encircles one teenage boy like a noose around his soul. The adult he reveres most in the world has given him a mission to destroy a hugely powerful wizard, yet as he gazes in a mirror, the quivering face staring back at him belies his resolve to do the deed. ...

If Potions Professor Horace Slughorn had mixed a brew to conjure up torrential rain, the weather could not have been worse for the premiere of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." Dedicated fans braved thunder, lightning and Biblical downpours in London's Leicester Square to catch a glimpse of the film's stars arriving at the opening of the sixth film in the wildly popular "Harry Potter" franchise. While dreadful weather has become an unfortunate tradition at Potter premieres (it rained during ...

A habitually violent young man was convicted Wednesday of the murder of teenage actor Rob Knox, who had starred in the latest "Harry Potter" film. Karl Bishop, 22, attacked Knox and four friends with two kitchen knives outside a bar in Sidcup, south east London, last May. He stabbed them 10 times in less than two minutes, the Old Bailey court in central London heard. Knox, 18, had rushed out of the bar after he heard that Bishop had threatened ...