Despite nearly a year's worth of hand-wringing in the media about 2005's five-percent-ish downturn at the box office (commonly referred to as The Slump, and accompanied by the sound of air-raid sirens), the business appears healthy enough overall; most studio executives haven't found themselves the victims of a movie-watching paradigm shift that would send them scrambling to sell their Lexus SUV's to meet their monthly coke bills just yet. Today's LAT writes off the supposedly apocalyptic effects on the industry of last year's "blip," but we're still reminded that the hysteria caused by a year of Aeon Fluxes and Stealths still claimed some high-profile victims:

· Var reports on yesterday's New Line layoffs (two dozen let go just in time for the holidays!), but says "no top execs were axed." We've heard that VPs Matt Moore and George Waud were among the purged, who many tell us should qualify as "top level execs." Developing... [Variety]
· Potentially great news for Arrested Development fans: Though FOX hasn't "officially" canceled AD yet, there are "serious" talks between 20th Century Fox TV and Showtime and ABC to find the series a new model home. We've heard rumblings (there we go hearing things again) that the Showtime deal might be close to completion, but we've been hurt before. [Variety, THR]
· The grown-up sons of Tito Jackson are shopping around a reality series in which they try to recapture the musical semi-fame of their youth. No further commentary necessary. [THR]
· Jamie Foxx will star in adaptation of James Stetson novel Blood on the Leaves for Paramount, as a "district attorney who grapples with feelings of revenge as he prosecutes a black history professor on trial for the murders of white men accused of crimes against blacks during the civil rights movement," Sadly, it looks like Foxx's vaunted musical skills will go unutilized in the role. [Variety]
· Disney's first attempt to tap into the Chinese entertainment market involves unraveling the secrets of a magic gourd. [THR]
· Now officially famous for becoming the new James Bond, Daniel Craig signs over ten percent of his soul to CAA. [Variety]

Three reports from last night's Media Christmas celebrations.

Aimless, drifting retiree Michael Eisner's severance contract might forbid him from poaching his favorite Disney cast members until 2007, but it can't stop the ambitious mogul from hooking up with that most coveted of entrepreneurial partners, the anonymous Craigslist poster with big ideas:

The LAT reports that retired Disney CEO Michael Eisner has had some informal, "Hey, at an unspecified date in the future, maybe you and I can get together and build a rival media company once my lawyers are satisfied that a court will find such future partnerships don't violate my severance deal" chats with a couple of his former lieutenants, but still hasn't made up his mind about his much-chattered-about next step. So why can't the set-up-for-untold- generations former mogul just fill his infinity pool with hundred dollar bills, pull up a deck chair, and watch as the crisp bills flutter placidly over the edge and out of sight? Because retirement is, like, totally boring:

· Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer "quietly" agree to a 5-year film production deal, locking up the producer responsible for half-a-billion dollars' worth of Pirates of the Caribbean sequels long enough to allow Bruck to oversee the eventual installments starring Paul Walker and Bruce Willis in the roles originated by Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp. To celebrate their continuing partnership, Mouse head Robert Iger and Bruckheimer will detonate Snow White's castle at the conclusion of tonight's Disneyland fireworks, then dance around any broken character bodies injured in the display. [Variety]
· Sundance announces this year's festival slate, with officials promising "a return to our roots" demonstrated by a commitment to movies that might seem less marketable to Hollywood types than years past. Hollywood types express their gratitude to the Sundance staff for further reducing any guilt they might feel about flying to Utah solely to drink themselves snowblind while fighting over gift bags. [THR]
· Paramount signs up Jim Carrey to star in a Tim Burton-directed action-adventure film based on Robert "Believe It or Not" Ripley's life, but the actor will "squeeze in" a thriller, a Ben Stiller comedy, and a brief nervous breakdown hiatus before reporting for Ripley duty next October. [Variety]
· The Squid and the Whale leads the Independent Spirit award nominations with six, including ones for best feature, best male lead, and best female lead. [THR]
· Faded NBC Uni golden boy Jeff Zucker lures Miramax survivor Meryl Poster to his lair with a producing deal for both television shows and feature films. Poster's deal also gives Zucker the contractual right to furtively assassinate her in the press should his own job ever seem in danger. [Variety]

Is there any colder dish of revenge than one served from the grave? True, Harvey Weinstein's final all-bomb slate of Miramax releases may not look great lumped together on his IMDb profile, but the demonic jollies he's no doubt getting over Disney's $313 million cliff-dive more than makes up for it:

· Sensing a chance to finally behead momentarily weakened New Year's Eve immortal Dick Clark, Fox recruits Regis Philbin to host a competing ball-dropping special to ring in 2006. [Variety]
· The Agent Dance, Dump The Sharks Edition: Gary Oldman flees CAA to cozy up with ICM. [THR]
· Disney crosses the international box office billion-dollar mark, making them the third studio (along with Fox and Warner Bros.) to do so this year. Please join us in celebrating the further enrichment of faceless multimedia conglomerates! Huzzah! [Variety]
· Penguins still red-hot, tragicomic bear-wranglers not so much: The Academy shortlists a record 15 documentaries for nomination, including March of the Penguins, but not Grizzly Man. [Variety]
· Because nothing says gravitas like the words "From the star of The Waterboy and the creative force behind The Mind of the Married Man," we can't imagine anyone else collaborating on a 9/11 drama but Adam Sandler and Mike Binder. [Variety]

· Warner Bros. says it's targeting older audiences with the PG-13 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, hoping to attract gullible pervs who think the more restrictive rating indicates that Hermione finally flashes a nipple. [Variety]
· NBC is number one! NBC is number one! OK, it's in product placement, but at this point they'll take anything that doesn't involve the words "fourth place." President Kevin Reilly is expected to take the entire company out for cupcakes to celebrate this hard-fought moral victory. [THR]
· Steve Jobs says Pixar is in "deep discussions" with Disney and if the two companies are to hammer out a new agreement, he hopes to have it done by the end of the year. Disney CEO Bob Iger, emboldened by Chicken Little's good enough opening, vows to only "beg a little, with a minimum of crying," and only if Jobs "asks politely." [Variety]
· Showtime reportedly axed 10 percent of its workforce this week; a spokeman says the cuts were in preparation for parent company Viacom's corporate split, not a knee-jerk response to a rumor that HBO was planning to let one of its production assistants go. [THR]
· Bull's Eye Entertainment develops for TV, including comedy project The Group about a rock band in therapy, and a small screen version of Paul Haggis film Crash, the tentatively titled The Racism Is Bad! White Guilt Melodrama Hour. [Variety]

Hollywood would be foolish to bet against Harvey Weinstein, even if his just-birthed Weinstein Co. pledges to operate under a policy of fiscal sanity and restraint. The NY Times reports that the New Harvey is willing to yank his belt tight (admittedly, a much easier proposition now that he's dropped much of the weight that could've resulted in a heart attack each time he choked the life from an underachieving employee ) to prove that he can make movies without Disney's open checkbook:

· In a dramatic move that nonetheless fails to inspire us to care much about the story, SAG's new leadership fires its national executive director. [Variety]
· Generously disregarding the last decade of his career, Al Pacino's acting peers met at the Beverly Hilton Hotel to praise him and present him with the 2005 American Cinematheque Award. [THR]
· Disney becomes the first (and only) studio to embrace the magical anti-piracy DVD players offered free to Academy members. No worries if you've already sold yours for a ten-spot at a yard sale—Disney probably doesn't have any real Oscar contenders, anyway. [Variety]
· Mark-Paul "I Will Always Be Zach Morris To An Entire Generation Of TV Viewers, No Matter How Many Serious Dramas I Do" Gosselaar will join the cast of Commander in Chief. Look for The West Wing to hire Lisa Turtle as a sassy presidential aide in retaliation. (Come on, a Screech joke would've been twice as hacky.) [THR]
· A bloodcurdling "Bitch, no you di'int!" echoes through superflack Pat Kingsley's office as rival Leslee Dart steals away a cherished PMK publicist for her fledgling Dart Group. Slapping of grills and yanking of weaves to follow. [Variety]

· Spike TV outbids USA, SciFi Channel, TBS, and TNT to get a six-year exclusive deal for all six Star Wars movies, paying a reported $65 to 70 million, a great opportunity for the network to show off how well the disappointment of the three latest films holds up on the small screen. [Variety]
· The Viacom split has been sped up, and will now be completed by year's end. There's nothing that soon-to-be CBS Corp CEO Les Moonves likes better than an accelerated divorce. [THR]
· NBC signs up Meet the Parents/Fockers writer Jim Herzfeld for a sitcom pilot based on his experiences working at an LA country club. "I tell the stories at cocktail parties, and people laugh," said Herzfeld, perhaps inadvertently revealing that NBC head Kevin Reilly made the deal while drunk and munching on crab cakes. [Variety]
· The WB "benches" Friday comedies Blue Collar TV and Living with Fran. It always makes us a little sad when the first time we hear of a show (who knew Fran Drescher was back?) is when reading a story about its impending cancellation. [THR]
· Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer Films pay $1.5 million for the rights to as-yet-unpublished Ahmet "No, Not Dweezil, The Other One" Zappa novel Monstrous Memoirs of a Mighty McFearless, about "a young brother and sister who learn their family is part of a long line of monster hunters... [and who] must band together against the most diabolical creature in the universe." Didn't take long for the Disney folks to take a thinly veiled shot at Michael Eisner, did it? [Variety]

· Warner Brothers throws money at a comedy pitch that sounds like the beginning of a very bad joke from the Wedding Crashers team of David Dobkin and Andrew Panay: "Story concerns three daughters who bring their boyfriends home — an Arab, a Jew and an African-American — to meet their hard-nosed Southern father during the holidays." As soon as the pair can remember the set-up for the one that ends with the duck telling the bartender to "just put it on my bill," Universal is expected to make a preemptive $5 million offer to the pair. [Variety]
· You already know about how you'll soon be able to squint through your favorite TV shows on the video iPod, but why not read the trade reports? [Variety, THR]
· Fox has kicked The Simple Life to the curb, but NBC and The WB might be interested in getting some sloppy seconds with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. [Variety]
· CBS picks up the back nine for Ghost Whisperer, Criminal Minds, and How I Met Your Mother. Clearly, Jennifer Love Hewitt's ghost-detecting rack is good for at least nine more episodes. [THR]
· The Yankees are out of the playoffs, but unfortunately for Fox, they took all the Nielsen families with them. [Variety]

Now that Michael Eisner has been stripped of his Mickey ears and cast out of the Magic Kingdom, new CEO Robert Iger wasted no time trying to get back into Apple/Pixar head Steve Jobs' pants. The two moguls did everything but claw at each other's belt buckles when they announced yesterday that ABC's shows will be available to download to the new video iPod, and hinted that the Disney-Pixar relationship may soon be back on:

An SEC filing reveals that Michael Eisner has resigned his seat on Disney's board of directors and "no longer provides any services" for the company, seemingly killing our crazy hope that he'd one day serve us a piping-hot churro outside the Haunted Mansion. Our Mouse ears are limp with grief, etc etc. The filing also discloses details of new CEO Bob Iger's compensation package; after paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in salary and bonuses to Eisner over his two decade tenure, it looks like the company wants Iger to earn his coming fuck-you money:

· Details of the Viacom split emerge: Sumner Redstone will still control everything, the two companies will share some directors, and new CEOs Tom Freston and Les Moonves won't be able to hot oil-wrestle for the same properties. Which is probably good news for Freston, as Moonves has been secretly practicing his Warm Crisco Figure Four Leg Lock for months. [Variety]
· The reality TV boogeyman continues to gobble up jobs that could be going to SAG members. But look at the flip side: reality TV creates many exciting opportunities for non-union sweatshop writers. [THR]
· Sensing that the nerd audience might be more forgiving of his "quirky" decision to name his son Kal-el, Nic Cage will executive produce the pilot The Dresden Files for Sci-Fi network. [Variety]
· UPN picks up the back nine for Everybody Hates Chris; somewhere deep within his secret lair, Les Moonves plots how he can shift the show to CBS without looking like a liar. [THR]
· Disney will adapt the novel If You Could See Me Now into a musical vehicle for Hugh Jackman. We're only going to say it one more time: There's nothing suspicious about Hugh Jackman's obsession with musicals, OK? If you had Jackman's triple-threat skills, you'd just close your eyes, slip into your tight, gold pants and cheetah shirt, and dance, dance, dance, not caring what people were whispering about you. [Variety]

On Friday, Michael Eisner officially stepped down as Head Mouse in Charge of the Walt Disney Company, ending his roughly two decades astride the Magic Kingdom. A Defamer spy stood in the sweltering heat to listen to Eisner's final address to his "cast members," filing this report:

Hey, Bob Iger, you're taking over as CEO of the Walt Disney Company! What are you going to do now? "I'm going to Disneyland!...And firing members of Michael Eisner's regime to show everyone I'm in charge!" Jim Hill Media, your source for all things Disney inside baseball, reports:

· Further proving that his desire for camp knows no bounds, Desperate Housewives mastermind Marc Cherry is working with Chucky creator Don Mancini on a "suspense drama" pilot for ABC tentatively titled Kill/Switch. One thing is clear: Cherry's about to produce television's next great, overrated guilty pleasure! [Variety]
· Renee Zellweger continues to wash that gay-seeming ex-hubby right out of her hair, will star in the Tom Cruise-produced The Eye, a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Jian gui. [THR]
· Every so often, Variety gets a little loopy and uncorks a headline worthy of celebrated wordsmith Ted Casablanca. Today is of one of those days: "Pix get das boot: Titles tripped by tapped-out Teutons." [Variety]
· Today Disney officially cuts ties to the Weinsteins, sending the brothers and their infant, but ambitious, company to suckle at someone else's billion-dollar teat. We didn't realize how disturbing the image of a nursing Harvey Weinstein was until we actually typed that last sentence. Please accept our apologies for scarring you on a Friday. [THR]
· Mike Myers will star as Who drummer Keith Moon in a biopic produced by Roger Daltrey. You know what that means: Myers gets to do yet another British accent. Puncture your eardrums with a meat thermometer now and save yourself the eventual, much more acute pain. [Variety]

Just two days away from officially stepping down as CEO of Disney, Michael Eisner is seeking a new, reduced role within the company, and, more importantly, an office in which to spend time wistfully staring out the window while listening to the hypnotic clack-clack of his favorite desk toy, remembering the good old days. From the LAT: