Box Office

Box office personnel walked off their jobs at the Mechanic Theatre yesterday, hours before the opening of the season's first show, 42nd Street. The breakdown with Local 868 of the union that represents ticket sellers for the Mechanic concerns the status of the box office manager, said David M. Anderson, president of the theater management group of Clear Channel Entertainment. Clear Channel believes the managers should be exempt from the union, Anderson said. However, Walter Cahill, an International Alliance of Theatrical State Employees official, played down that issue, saying, "It's an economic strike.

J. Cole, the North Carolina-based rapper whose sophomore album, "Born Sinner," drops Tuesday, will perform at Baltimore Soundstage tonight, according to Soundstage's Twitter page . It was not announced before this morning. Tickets cost $1, and can be purchased on a first-come, first-serve basis at the Soundstage box office starting at 4 p.m. There's a limit of one ticket per person. The show is 18+ and you must have a state-issued ID, according to Soundstage's Twitter page.

As if The Island and Stealth weren't big enough box-office disasters, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath will likely further hurt the already slumping 2005 domestic box office, experts said Thursday. In addition to theaters either destroyed or under water in the New Orleans area and other Gulf Coast states, more people are likely to be glued to their television screens over the weekend, absorbing the real-life drama as it continues to unfold. "Labor Day is generally the weakest of the holiday weekends to begin with and obviously in the South and the Gulf region, we should see some depressed sales at movie theaters," said Gitesh Pandya, editor of Box OfficeGuru.

As someone who came of age after the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, I was really struck and disturbed by some of the scenes in the Jackie Robinson movie, "42" ("'42' hits a homer at the box office," April 15). When you see the crowds in these scenes with their bigotry, anger, intolerance and narrow-mindedness, I am struck and confused, wondering if I am watching an African-American hero trying to integrate professional baseball in 1963, or watching an African-American hero, (Dr. Ben Carson or any other conservative speaker)

BOSTON -- Maybe the boy in front of us really was 18. A kind of fuzzy-cheeked 18. A short 18. In any case, I wasn't about to ask the tyke for his ID. The idea that a child sneaked into "South Park," the R-rated movie about four cartoon children sneaking into an R-rated movie, was too delicious to pass up. "South Park," the longer, funnier, cruder, ruder version of the television show, has hunkered in at the megaplex just as the children are...

J. Cole, the North Carolina-based rapper whose sophomore album, "Born Sinner," drops Tuesday, will perform at Baltimore Soundstage tonight, according to Soundstage's Twitter page . It was not announced before this morning. Tickets cost $1, and can be purchased on a first-come, first-serve basis at the Soundstage box office starting at 4 p.m. There's a limit of one ticket per person. The show is 18+ and you must have a state-issued ID, according to Soundstage's Twitter page.

Hollywood -- Each Sunday, Hollywood studios release estimates of how their movies performed at the box office, and the resulting Top 10 list is disseminated to the world through the media.The nation's No. 1 movie, be it "Batman Forever" or "Pocahontas" or "Congo," is, thus, judged a success or failure in the public mind simply by how much money it took in on its opening weekend of release.But how accurate are those Sunday numbers that receive such wide play?While studio executives say every effort is made to be as accurate as possible, they acknowledge that the process, by its very nature, is flawed.

LOS ANGELES - War of the Worlds conquered the box office as easily as the movie's aliens overpowered Earth, but it did not have enough firepower to overcome Hollywood's prolongued box office slump. Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise's sci-fi tale took in $77.6 million over the long Fourth of July weekend, lifting its total since debuting Wednesday to $113.3 million, according to studio estimates yesterday. That fell well short of the all-time high held by Spider-Man 2, whose $180.1 million haul in its first six days led Hollywood to a record Fourth of July weekend last year.

LOS ANGELES - Maybe nice guys finish last, but Mean Girls came in first at the weekend box office. The comedy starring Lindsay Lohan as a student who gets swept up in the backstabbing politics of fashion, love and popularity among high school cliques, earned $25 million, according to studio estimates yesterday. Although it starred 17-year-old Lohan, the presence of Saturday Night Live star Tina Fey, who also wrote the screenplay, appealed to grown-up moviegoers. About 75 percent of the audience was female and about half the audience was under 18, said Wayne Lewellen, head of distribution for Paramount, which released the movie.

LOS ANGELES -- The Will Ferrell comedy Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby stayed in first place at the box office for a second weekend with $23 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates yesterday. Estimated ticket sales are for Friday through Sunday at United States and Canadian theaters, according to box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. WeekendTotalNo. ofRankTitle (Studio)gross *gross*weeks 1Talladega Nights (Sony)$23.0$70.02 2Step Up (Touchstone)$21.

I was pleased to read your recent article regarding the lawsuit against Ticketmaster ("City politicians rush to save Ticketmaster's user fees," Feb. 24). I now know who to thank: Kudos to Andre Bourgeois for bringing the suit and winning the case. I attend many productions in Baltimore, be they at the Meyerhoff, the Lyric or elsewhere around town. But I will never go to any event unless I can buy a ticket at the box office. Every company is entitled to make a profit for its services, but the exorbitant fees tacked onto tickets by Ticketmaster, which I refuse to pay, are pure gouging.

Center Stage welcomes the New Year with Katori Hall's "The Mountaintop," a play set in the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis on April 3, 1968. The main characters are Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a maid who stops by his room. The production, directed by Center Stage artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah, starts previews next week, opens Jan. 16 and runs through Feb. 24. The run coincides with MLK Day on Jan. 21, so the company is adding a performance that night to mark the occasion. Pricing will be different, too -- there's a pay-what-you-can policy for 100 tickets.

I pay no more attention to the Academy Awards than to the Miss America pageant and other reality shows, but the heavy-breathing coverage of the Academy Awards sometimes sparks a faint interest. This from Slate : Now that Ben Affleck's Iran hostage drama Argo has garnered seven Oscar nominations to add to its mantle, upon which already sit $110 million in domestic box office, near unanimous acclaim from critics, and even a whisper campaign for Affleck to run for John Kerry's soon-to-be vacated Senate seat, it needs to be said: Argo is a fraud.

We didn't see this coming: Virgin Mobile just announced they will release 1,000 extra FreeFest tickets on Friday. The $20 "Karma" tickets will only be available at the Merriweather Post Pavilion South box office and the 9:30 Club box office from noon to 6 p.m. (or until they run out) Friday. There will be a two-ticket limit. Proceeds will go toward the Re*Generation House, Virgin Mobile's new homeless youth shelter in Washington. This is a final push so the shelter "won't have to worry about funding for at least two years," according to spokeswoman Audrey Fix Schaefer.

The Orioles' first-half success has paid dividends at the Camden Yards box office. Doug Duennes, executive vice president of business operations, told the Baltimore Business Journal that the team experienced a 21 percent increase in ticket sales so far this season. Duennes also mentioned "some uptick" in suite rentals and group sales. A winning product on the field combined with new additions to Camden Yards certainly have contributed to the increased profit. “There's a lot of things that go into it,” Duennes told the Business Journal.

"The Very Hungry Caterpillar. " It either could be a charming children's movie, or the caterpillar could be made into a giant human-eating caterpillar and it could be a bloody, campy horror. Luke Broadwater, reporter, The Baltimore Sun I'm very interested in the cinematic possibilities for "Go the F--- to Sleep. " Especially as directed by Zach Snyder or Darren Aronofsky. Anne Tallent, editor, b "The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junkfood" is one of my favorite children's books.

HOLLYWOOD -- Once a dumping ground for Hollywood's dregs, August has become a key month in an increasingly competitive, year-round business at the box office. Proof came this weekend when Universal Pictures' thriller The Bourne Ultimatum, starring Matt Damon, opened to an estimated $70.2 million in the United States and Canada - a record for a movie launched in August and one of the best starts ever for an action film. "This year, in particular, there are a lot of good movies coming during August," said Nikki Rocco, Universal's president of domestic distribution.

LOS ANGELES -- King Kong topped the box office last weekend, but wasn't a blockbuster. With just Brokeback Mountain as its new competiton, Kong likely can hold onto the lead. The top 20 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Monday, followed by distributor, gross, number of theater sites, average receipts per location, number of weeks in release and total gross, as compiled Tuesday by Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc.:

A few thousand tickets for the Ravens' divisional playoff game will be available for public sale starting Tuesday at 10 a.m., the team announced today. Tickets for the Ravens game, which will be played Jan. 15 at 1 p.m. at M&T Bank Stadium, can be purchased at baltimoreravens.com or through Ticketmaster (410-547-7328 or 1-800-551-7328) There will be no ticket sales at the M&T Bank Stadium box office. The Ravens will play either the Houston Texans, Denver Broncos or Pittsburgh Steelers in their first home playoff game since 2007.

An area theater that does consistently fine work is beginning its last season in its current home. Everyman Theatre's upcoming season is slated to be its final one on N. Charles Street, in the Station North arts and entertainment district. Work is well under way on its new home downtown in the renovated Town Theater, just around the corner from the Hippodrome Theatre. So this will be a season to remember in the long local history of Everyman. It kicks off Sept. 7 with Lorraine Hansberry's classic drama, “A Raisin in the Sun.” This timeless story about the aspirations of a black family in Chicago in the 1950s still resonates in any discussion of the American dream.