The master of secrets behind Lost (well, sort of behind it) has a new movie coming out that no one's ever heard of! A teaser will play before Iron Man 2, giving a first-ever glimpse. So what's it about?

The soul-deadening imposition of commercial brands on your moviegoing experience got even more shameless this morning when the oft-overlooked ring of Hell know as "brandcameo" unveiled the winners of its fourth annual Product Placement Awards. You could probably guess at least most of the heavyweight competitors — your Apples, your Fords, your Manolos — from a glance at the last year's worth of releases, but that doesn't make the year's findings any less remarkable in context: The surveyors counted an average of 22.1 brands in each of the 20 films this year to have a No. 1 weekend at the box office. That number is down from 2007, when an average of nearly 25 brands were counted among the year's 32 top releases. The dollars aren't disclosed, but follow the jump for a depressing if fascinating array of blockbusters for sale, the brands that bought them and the ultimate recognition of their unholy unions:

While you might expect to be mildly offended by the people behind Date Movie, Epic Movie, and Meet the Spartans, it's usually because they're coming out with more movies rather than because of anything in the films themselves. Now, though, they've made the classy move of premiering their latest spoof, Disaster Movie, on August 29th — the third anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Not to be outdone by the swift, shaky-cam destruction of its transcontinental nemeses in Cloverfield, Los Angeles is getting its own taste of catastrophe in the latest viral sensation to hit YouTube. At least we think it's L.A.; some have suggested that Case 1017 — the grainy home video of HazMat-suited CDC officials and semi-automatic weapons fire that has attracted 1.1 million views since Saturday — is a tease for Cloverfield 2 or M. Night Shyamalan's forthcoming Philly disaster epic The Happening. Follow the jump, however, for what turns out to be a much simpler explanation.

· In this clip from the increasingly depressing Celebrity Rehab, we learn that Brigitte Nielsen's husband doesn't exactly have a firm grasp on the English language. Either that or heavy bouts of boozing really give Brigitte a wicked case of the munchies.
· Never got around to seeing Cloverfield: The Movie but still want to see what the monster looks like? Then take a gander at the toy that's going to retail for $99.99! Why so pricy? Batteries ARE included. [Slashfilm]
· Anne Hathaway's armpits are positively resplendent (if you're into that sort of thing). [Goldenfiddle]
· Lily Allen has gone goth. Didn't see that one coming. [Daily Mail]
· How can this be? CBS decided to renew NUMB3RS but left How I Met Your Mother precariously perched on the bubble. Inconceivable! [TV Decoder]

Perhaps scared off by the litany of physical side effects rattled off at triple-speed towards the end of its TV spots, audiences abandoned Cloverfield in droves in its second weekend at the box office. Still, before moving on to their next Ken Davitian-in-nipple-jewelry obsession, fickle entertainment consumers managed to cement its status as the biggest January opening, like, ever. Which means, of course, that a sequel is already in development:

· Looking for inventive ways to develop scripted programming during the writers strike, CBS Paramount TV reaches across our northern border to partner with CTV to produce the police drama Flashpoint. which will be scripted and shot in Canada. "[The production values] will be as good as any American production," somewhat defensively notes a source, trying to alleviate fears that CBS is trying to save money by eventually airing some second-rate Mountie melodrama badly overdubbed to eliminate suspicious Canadian accents. [Variety]
· As expected, the WGA has reached an interim deal with the Grammys, saving the highly expendable awards show from suffering the same undignified fate as the Golden Globes. Reacts Recording Academy president Neil Portnow, revealing that he may never have watched a Grammys telecast: "Having our talented writers on the team further ensures the highest level of creativity and innovation, something our audience has come to expect every year." [THR]

With the secret of Cloverfield now out, legions of American thrill-seeking moviegoers are emerging from theaters with one finger pressed to their puckered mouths, trying to make it to the cineplex restroom before succumbing to the effects of CBS, or Cloverfield Barf Syndrome. Theaters have taken to posting warnings about the film's side-effects (see photo), and some have even gone so far as to set up [spoiler alert] plastic-tarp containment zones, where suspected victims are quickly herded by ushers in HAZMAT suits before they can detonate into a splat of green liquid. With panic over the quickly spreading condition increasing, CNN.com approached some physicians for advice:

Looking to relive the rousing and not-at-all-vomit-inducing in-theater experience of going to see Cloverfield: The Movie? Still trying to figure out exactly what that monster (spoilers!) really was/is? Well, thanks to those lovable scamps at Hasbro, those of you with $99.99 and a lot of patience can soon own a Cloverfield monster of your very own! And by soon, we mean in October. Of 2008. Nothing like striking while the iron is hot, guys! [Coming Soon]

Some cinema-goers weren't impressed by the shaky amateur feel of the hit Manhattan monster movie. "I wish a bootlegger would go tape that movie in the theatre with the steadicam setting on."

You know, Hollywood has a dream, too: Seeing summer box office numbers in the dead of January. This weekend, that dream has finally come to pass, bringing movie executives of all stripes and luxury-car-driving-categories out of their offices and into the streets, to stand together and toss bushels of warm money into the air in a stirring showing of producerly love. The numbers:

Cloverfield, the movie in which an assorted group of Manhattan party-goers are picked off by an unexplained monster, reaches for authenticity. The movie, which brought in a hefty $41m over the weekend at the box office, is shot in the style of an amateur video. Apart from a cameraman who manages to keep shooting and cracking jokes even under alien attack, the yuppie characters are more or less credible. The one plotline that prompted a harrumph of disbelief from a downtown audience: the protagonists descend into the subway at Spring Street, walk along the tunnel, run from some alien cockroaches, and, within a few minutes, discover they're already at 59th Street. That's some express line. (After the jump, if by some miracle you haven't seen it, the Cloverfield trailer.)

We've already run the advance reviews (what—you don't trust Nicholas Chance, Kid Detective Reviewer?), and given you an exclusive! semi-blurry insider's gallery of Wednesday night's premiere. But with today's opening, everyone can finally check out Cloverfield for themselves—or not, if Godzilla vs. Felicity isn't your thing. (It was totally our thing.) The reviews are in:
· "The doomed Gotham created by producer J.J. Abrams — he with the golden Felicity, Alias, and Lost touch — and his team is almost entirely populated by vapid, twenty-something nincompoops. Oops, I mean attractive, indistinguishable young people who handle cell phones, DV cameras, etc., with ease; call one another ''dude''; don't have anything interesting to say; and, perhaps as a result, don't listen to one another, even in an emergency." [EW.com]

· Actually, it kinda looks like a dude to us.
· Spoiler alert! The Cloverfield Monster ... revealed! Click only if you must.
· "Did I, at any point, say to you, 'Flip the genre'? No. All I said was to put in a few more song and dance numbers."
· If the advance quotes are any indication, the new Pixar tell-all is going to read like a Dreamworks animation picture.
· We agree with The Fiddler, Ledger's Joker looks for the world like Beetlejuice.
· We loves us some Tina Fey, but the trailer for Baby Mama looks stillborn.

Last night was the premiere of Cloverfield on Paramount's lot, an event they were kind enough to invite us to. Without getting too deeply into the what and the how of it, we'll only say that the movie was the rare release to receive a unanimous thumbs up from Defamer HQ: short, slick, and ferociously sweet.

If Harry Knowles's ecstatic, Greatest Single Experience of All Time Including My First Breath, First Kiss, and the First Time I Tasted Cherry Garcia review of Cloverfield wasn't enough to get you excited about Paramount's latest release, perhaps we can tempt you with this headless Statue of Liberty replica currently erected on their lot.

At long last, Cloverfield, Slusho Beverage Corp.'s bold foray into the sci-fi disaster genre, had its first screenings last night. Hours later, members of the fanboy journalist elite lucky enough to have had first, unfettered access to the mysterious creature at the center of all the monument-decapitating mayhem, took to the internets. Below, a round-up of the buzz. [Ed. note: We'll try to avoid spoilers, but promise nothing. You've been warned.]
· If we are to believe the Kingdom of the Fanboys' semi-merciful Lord and Ruler Harry Knowles, it was a watershed moment in giant-fucking- monster-stomping- through-Manhattan cinematic history: "The movie is fucking brilliant. It's what we were told it was going to be. An intimate perspective on an impossibly grand scale human disaster beyond most human levels of comprehension." Slashfilm reminds us, however, that this was a guy who thought the Godzilla remake was peaches. [AICN, Slashfilm]

As much of the geeky-gened moviegoing world tries to decode the mysteries of Cloverfield, obsessively connecting the push-pin dots on bulletin boards covered in maps and radioactive monster imagery, our friends at LAist had the novel idea to approach director Matt Reeves directly. It turns out he was extremely forthcoming, offering oodles of fanboynip, including background on the project's history, its buzzy, pre-Transformers trailer, and even the origins of its ambiguous title that sounds like a margarine brand:

In a stunning Romcom Release-Date Push-Back Exclusive, usmagazine.com is reporting that Katherine Heigl's hotly unanticipated Knocked Up feature film follow-up, 27 Candles Dresses, will be opening on January 18, not January 11, as had been previously scheduled. A Fox "insider" offered a suspiciously sanguine, "The movie played so well at public sneak previews on December 27 that it was decided just last night to move it back a week to take advantage of the holiday weekend." Skeptics that we are when it comes to an anonymous studio flack's pom-pom waving, we're wondering if the extra week isn't instead for them to add some 11th hour footage of Heigl's head being blown off by an unseen, fire-belching beast, the better to position the film opposite Paramount's Godzilla-sized offering, Cloverfield. [usmagazine.com]