'X-Men' brings $103M over weekend
HOLLYWOOD, May 29 (UPI) -- Fox's "X-Men: The Last Stand" took in a hefty $103.12 million in gross ticket receipts over the long holiday weekend, estimates boxofficemojo.com.
Sony's "The Da Vinci Code" accounted for $34 million in the second weekend.
The animated "Over the Hedge" fell to third with $26.875 million for the second weekend.
Next was Paramount's "Mission: Impossible III" with $6.697 million in its fourth weekend, followed by "Poseidon" with $5.53 million in its third.
"RV" took in $4.1 million in its fifth weekend.
"See No Evil" on its sixth weekend run came in at No. 7 with $2.6 million.
"Just My Luck" came in at eighth place during its seventh weekend with $1.825 million.
"United 93" in its ninth weekend collected $808,000 and "An American Haunting" $726,000.
Spacey shrugs off hostile U.K. press
LONDON, May 29 (UPI) -- Actor and artistic director of London's Old Vic Theater, Kevin Spacey says he doesn't mind the British press hostility he gets, as that's what sells papers.
In a telephone interview with The New York Times, the 46-year-old said he didn't want to get into mud-slinging with the press, which has called some of his productions "stinkers," the Times said.
"To some degree they're taking advantage of the fact that I'm a well-known actor and using it as a headline in their stories to sell papers. This is what they do," Spacey said.
The most recent failure was "Resurrection Blues," a star-laden production that got terrible reviews and closed a week early this spring, just as the theater announced it would go dark until September.
The first play he put on, the Dutch comedy "Cloaca," drew terrible reviews in which The Daily Telegraph and The Times of London called it a "stinker."
"The Philadelphia Story" was more successful but tended to fare much better with audiences than with critics, the Times said.
Hidden sketches in da Vinci piece revealed
FLORENCE, Italy, May 29 (UPI) -- An Italian art scientist has discovered sketches by an unknown artist underneath Leonardo da Vinci's "Adoration of the Magi."
Using multispectrum imaging, Maurizio Seracini found the brown monochrome painting on top of da Vinci's under-drawings was carried out by a minor artist about 20 years after da Vinci had finished and abandoned the preparatory work, The Times of London reported.
The presence of da Vinci's own under-drawings have already been recreated from the work, showing knights at battle, an elephant and workers rebuilding a ruined temple.
Da Vinci was commissioned to do the Renaissance work by a community of monks in Scopeto, near Florence, in 1481, and historians agree the monks were probably shocked when they saw the work being developed by the 29-year-old artist.
"They almost certainly didn't want a bloody battle going on a few inches from the Madonna's head," Seracini said.
A video of Seracini's findings is available online at florence.tv.
Digital piracy hurting comics industry
LOS ANGELES, May 29 (UPI) -- Declining sales and digital online piracy of comic books are threatening small U.S. publishers, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday.
Although not as pervasive as music sharing, an informal Web poll of 4,621 readers from December 2004 to December 2005 by Comic Book Resources, an online magazine, found more than 30 percent had downloaded a comic book at least once, and 12 percent said they downloaded comic books regularly.
Robert Burnett, whose Los Angeles production company, Ludovico Technique, launched the "Living in Infamy" series last year about a witness-protection program for super-villains. Burnett said he publishes about 2,000 to 5,000 copies per issue, and so far isn't aware of any of his titles being shared online.
"Comic-book piracy for us would be a problem," Burnett said. "Our retail price is $3. Every book that we sell matters."
