Lionsgate is reportedly allocating a portion of its new credit line to therapists after Dane Cook, the co-star of the studio's forthcoming "edgy comedy with a dash of romance" My Best Friend's Girl, lashed out today at the poor souls responsible for the film's poster. As if their mission to sell a Dane Cook film wasn't challenging enough, the actor/comedian assailed everything from the designers' Photoshop skills to his own hair ("actually a close up shot of Tom Selleck's Magnum P.I. mustache," he notes) in a quest for cosmic poster justice. For reasons we'll explain after the jump, we think he's being a little hard on the artists. After all, isn't there a little bit "Brittany Spears' [sic] vagina" in all of us?

We're sorry to note this morning that the laff-a-minute presidential opus W. has earned its first negative review, and it's one from which the film may have difficulty recovering: Elisabeth Hasselbeck needed only the trailer to swear off Oliver Stone's all-star romp through the life and times of George W. Bush, citing the filmmaker's "bias" and critical treatment of a sitting Commander in Chief. Her outraged View co-hosts Sherri Shepherd and Whoopi Goldberg — the latter still stung by the crippling backlash to trailers for her 2006 classic Homie Spumoni — warned of the implications of judging too harshly before seeing the film, but it was no use. Damage control is on at Lionsgate, meanwhile, where desperate marketing kingpin Tim Palen reportedly earmarked up to a third of his studio's new $340 million credit line for an early, spoilerrific David Letterman rave. Alas, some bells just can't be unrung. [AOL]

We have all kinds of fun ideas for how Lionsgate can splurge with its new $340 million credit line, a kind of shocking development considering Wall Street's recent exodus from the deadly film-financing racket. The budget-minded 'Gate, having leapfrogged from one genre hit to another (accruing a $331 million cash war chest along the way, according to Variety) is evidently immune to the crunch, however, even nabbing a 2.25% interest rate we haven't seen since our very first student loans.

After a nearly four-year partnership that has yielded only the finest in crossdressing minstrelsy and Cosby-kid jail-ho cameos, Lionsgate and Tyler Perry today announced a new development pact for the glitter-shitting auteur through at least 2011. According to a press release issued this afternoon, the deal picks up after the release of Perry's next two films — The Family That Preys and Madea Goes to Jail (infamously co-starring Keshia Knight Pulliam in the plum role of "Imprisoned Hooker") — and will keep the 'Gate in the lucrative Perry DVD business for the foreseeable future as well.

As the clock ticks down to the planned (and totally insane!) October 17th release date of Oliver Stone's W, more details are emerging about the plot and structure of what we're still fairly convinced is some sort of elaborate April Fool's Day stunt. We've seen the teaser poster, and now, the Los Angeles Times' John Horn checks in on the film and reveals what could go down in cinematic history as one of the medium's most outrageous structural devices:

We're not sure how many impatient fans it takes to make something "long-awaited," but we'll give Lionsgate's Angelina Jolie-starring adaptation of Atlas Shrugged the benefit of the doubt — especially now that the attached director Vadim Perelman has officially left Objectivist headquarters:

Clive Barker's legions of horror fans have gotten their barbed-wire panties in a bunch. At issue is Lionsgate's release plans for their adaptation of Barker's short story, The Midnight Meat Train. Despite the story being a fan favorite, and a satisfying trailer (mmm...yuppie chops!) featuring the U.S. directing debut of Japanese horror maven Ryuhei Kitamura, new studio president Joe Drake bumped the movie from its May 15th date—which allowed The Strangers to clean up as the only R-rated horror option of the weekend. It was a curious strategy shift, to say the least, and not the least bit helped by a significant conflict of interest. Or as Deadline Hollywood Daily puts it, "Guess who was exec producer of The Strangers? Joe Drake." Fansite shocktillyoudrop.com, meanwhile, has since discovered the grim truth of what's become of Meat Train's remains:

THR reports today that Briana "Daughter of B.J. and the Bear's Greg" Evigan has been cast as the lead in Burning Bright—a Born Free meets When A Stranger Calls thriller from Sobini Films in which "a woman wakes in the midst of a hurricane to find a tiger roaming through the home, [and is] forced to drag her autistic young brother through the house in a desperate attempt at survival." As if that isn't intriguing enough, an operative points out that two paragraphs from the end comes this curious statement, which has since gone missing from the online version:

Oliver Stone's drive to get his Bush biopic W in front of audiences before Election Day acquired new momentum on Thursday — if you can believe it. And we guess we have no choice but to wait and see if the director and Lionsgate, which yesterday picked up the film's North American distribution rights, can place their prismatic presidential quasi-drama on screens by their proposed Oct. 17 release date. Oct. 17! Stone hasn't even cast Dick Cheney yet — for a film that starts shooting Monday. Not a problem, insists the filmmaker, who's still spinning on the big picture:

In a cry for help not-so-curiously coinciding with this week's surge in comics-to-film blockbusters, Lionsgate announced Tuesday that it plans to bump up Frank Miller's adaptation of The Spirit from Jan. 16, 2009, to Dec. 25 of this year. And why not? Flanked by fellow Christmas Day releases Bedtime Stories (an Adam Sandler "laffer") and Fox's wobbly Jennifer Aniston/Owen Wilson comedy Marley and Me (not to mention the expanded release of Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon), the Will Eisner crime-fighter is about as safe a late year counter-programming bet as the studio will get. But are there — gulp — Oscar hopes?

The inevitable grouping of the major studios under the iTunes roof finally occurred today, when Apple officially announced it had reached agreements with Universal, Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros., Sony and Lionsgate (along with previous bedfellow Disney) on day-and-date downloads of their new DVD titles. The studios had made most releases available for rental since earlier this year (with catalog titles for sale before that), but this marks the first time users can buy and download new releases on their DVD street dates.

While most of us fled the office to enjoy early spring, Sumner Redstone spent another relaxing weekend watching his corporate children at Viacom gouge each others' eyes out. And this time around he got his money's worth, with Paramount finally breaking free from CBS/Showtime to start its own pay-cable and VOD service with MGM and Lionsgate. It's an untidy, somewhat shocking scenario that we (and seemingly the rest of the Web) can't yet make sense of, but join us after the jump to parse the winners and losers at a glance.

We were not among the critics who recently took offense to Tyler Perry's frocked-out "minstrelsy" antics in Meet the Browns, but we are more than a little beside ourselves with today's news that Perry has cast Keshia Knight Pulliam — best known as the youngest Huxtable child, Rudy, on The Cosby Show — as an "imprisoned prostitute" in his upcoming installment in the Madea canon, Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail. We can't believe it; she grew up so fast!

Landing somewhere between her "slutty college journalist" from Scoop and her "miscast blond enabler" from The Black Dahlia, photos of Scarlett Johansson's "sexy nurse" get-up in The Spirit leaked online late Tuesday to a bit of mixed industry reaction. Featuring Johansson as femme fatale Silken Floss, the shots appear culled from a wardrobe/hair/make-up test for Frank Miller's upcoming adaptation of the classic comic; as such, distributor Lionsgate (and its lawyers) are up in arms while the rest of us worry about the long-term setbacks to sexy nurses everywhere.

We admit not devoting much thought to the sensation that is Tyler Perry's Madea franchise (Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Madea's Family Reunion, and this week's Meet the Browns among others) beyond the actor-writer-director's garish drag stylings and Lionsgate's savvy in attracting one of moviegoing's most underserved audiences back to theaters every couple years. Thank God for Salon's James Hannaham, who today breaks down the Perry phenomenon for the controversial throwbacks to minstrelsy, misogyny and all-around insensitivity old Madea may actually represent:

Our first indication that something might be awry with Jessica Alba's career came not when that guy on TRL told her that getting pregnant was "Not cool, dude", but rather when we saw the one-sheet for her new movie, The Eye. While certainly a captivating Photoshop job (ish), we found it fairly bizarre that Lionsgate would choose NOT to use the beautiful visage of one of the most lusted-after actresses in the world to promote their film. But then we did some research on Rotten Tomatoes and realized something very important. Save for fanboy fave Sin City, no one really seems to have liked any of the films she's starred in.

• My Rambo Review [YouTube via BWE]

When we briefly worked through the ramifications of the interim deal that Lionsgate struck with the WGA late last week, our thoughts immediately turned to the eventual resumption of production of the company's critically acclaimed, hit TV properties like Mad Men, daring to dream that our favorite hard-drinking, secretary-despoiling ad execs might find their way back to AMC in the not-too-distant future. But we never thought to consider the potential dark side of LG's television business lurching back into action, and so were shocked to learn this afternoon that the studio is partnering with Starz, our go-to premium-cable movie outlet when HBO seems to be showing nothing but Just My Luck and The Devil Wears Prada, to adapt subtle, multiple-Oscar-winning L.A. race-parable Crash for the small screen. The good news: according to Var, "high production values" and the participation of the original, uniquely heavy-handed creative team will ensure a viewing experience every bit as fulfilling as your original trip to the multiplex. The bad news:

Lionsgate, the plucky indie studio who mined the untold box office potential of film franchises featuring a creepy marionette on a tricycle and an equally creepy actor in grandma drag, has forged its own side deal with the WGA:

Ease your disappointment from walking into a Halloween party this weekend to discover that no fewer than five other people had been stricken by the same "California wildfire" brainstorm that led you to char your favorite souvenir Malibu t-shirt by reviewing the weekend's box office numbers: