It's New Years Eve on an island in Turks and Caicos. Sitting at a small beach bar is a leathery white-haired ghost who sometimes still haunts Johnny Depp. Nightmare teen Justin Bieber enters the room.

The trailer for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, the sequel to the 2007 cinematic masterpiece, Ghost Rider, has it all: creepy precocious child actors, talking skeleton demons all ablaze, the devil taking on human form, a guy with blond hair. Topped off with the ultimate coup de grâce that is Nic (insert facial tic) Cage. Already we see him on a motorcycle, we see him cracking jokes, we see him doubled over, his body racked with sobs. Ah yes, right where we left him.

As 2010 draws to a close, it's time to tally receipts and get our accounts in order. This includes the world's most important figures, movie box office numbers! The top 10 highest grossing movies of 2010 are...

Or maybe just her director is? Also this weekend, the kraken marches farther and farther away, Tyler Perry continues to investigate his (non-existent) marriage, and Jay Baruchel might soon become enormous.

This movie-going weekend, lots of people wanted to see the gods killing each other. And others wanted to see married couples trying to kill each other. And of course there were the Miley Cyrus lookie loos, who are creepy.

"Release the Kraken" is shaping up to be a pretty great meme. So we decided to push it over the top by making a "Release the Kraken" video. So without further ado: Liam Neeson...please release that Kraken.

The announced guests for Jay Leno's second show back at 11:35 are snowboarder/cannabis enthusiast Shaun White and television personality Sarah Palin. Which is a weird enough couch. But is the musical guest going to be Adam Lambert?

Logan Lerman rumormongers about his own role. There is a glut of 3D movies. Nelly Furtado's in a hockey musical. The 'Paranormal Activity' people have five more films coming. Ease yourself into the Trade Roundup's all-leather interior.

The Hoff is back: A&E has picked up a reality series starring David Hasselhoff and it's gonna be huge. What do you think the show's about? Drinking? No, unfortunately. It is about his David Hasselhoff's beautiful daughters.

We may not have anything left of our environment or economy by 2010, but at least we'll have something to keep us interested in the cinema. And the marketing machine is already starting. Check out the coming attractions!

David O. Russell continues to work, Ralph Fiennes plays evil so well, Virginia Madsen: champion of ski jumpers! Eastbound & Down will pitch again, and crazy Brittany Murphy joins a crazy movie.

With its enshrinement as The Greatest Film Ever Made safely assured and its box-office trajectory soaring ever upward, The Dark Knight is now being groomed for a spot so exclusive that it only changes hands once per decade: The highest-grossing film in history. Feel free to take the news with a grain of salt, seeing as it came from the notably math-challenged John Horn in today's LA Times; even so, it's hard to argue when Knight is looking at $400 million by this weekend and Titanic sits idle at the dock with $600 million. Seriously — $400 million in two weeks. But as we note after the jump, that last hurdle might be taller than it looks.Observers attribute the record haul-to-date in part to the same repeat viewers who bumped Titanic to No. 1; turnouts among "older moviegoers, families, Latino and African American audiences" are higher than normal as well. And last weekend, anyhow, The Dark Knight enjoyed the advantage of weak competition. Those days are over, though, with the execrable Mummy 3 nevertheless looking at a $50 million opening this Friday and Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder set to usurp their own cuts of DK's marketshare in the weeks to come. By comparison, Titanic had 15 weeks at number one — most in the late-winter studio dumping grounds of early 1998, as Horn points out, and aided heavily by its inexorable march to Oscar glory. Similar factors could dovetail in unique ways for The Dark Knight, though, as its proximity to both the fertile July market and this fall's more prestigious film crop means Warner can revive its Terry Gilliam-endorsed Oscar chatter just in time to stretch DK's long tail into awards season. Call it Phase 2, even if Warners distribution boss Dan Fellman takes the high road with Horn: "We are honored to be considered in that company. But I think Titanic will hold that record for eternity." Don't sell yourself short, Dan! Or, more importantly, don't underestimate a James Cameron sabotage campaign — we're already seeing evidence of a conspiracy online. That's when you know you're a phenomenon.

In a piece ostensibly about how terrible Damien Hirst is (breaking!), New Republic literary editor and noted crank Leon Wieseltier declares that there is no such thing as "rock bottom," that there is never a point at which things can't get worse, and offers as proof of this maxim the existence of Christopher Hitchens. Allow him to explain:

It's funny — we were just talking to someone last week about the slow decline of Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote and/or directed some of the '80s best films of their respective genres, including The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Body Heat, Silverado and The Big Chill. Little did we know how desperately he seems to regret not having a piece of the cult 1981 sword-and-sandals classic Clash of the Titans, a Kasdan-written, Louis Leterrier-directed remake of which is now on the way from Warner Bros.