'Indiana Jones' PlunderWatch: 'Skull' Cracks $9 Tril in Eight Hours

And we're off! At the stroke of midnight, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull began screening on 4260 U.S. screens, and 12,000 more around the planet.

Tracing Shia LaBeouf Back To His Humble Origins As An Echo Park Hot Dog Carnie

Part of this easygoing showmanship comes from LaBeouf's teenage years in Echo Park, where despite being nearly the only white kid for miles, he blended in. He picked up freestyle rapping. He was, he says, "a major dozens player" at a mostly black school. Just so he could hang out with his friends, he learned how to breakdance. "It was sort of your greeting card," he says. "Like, yeah, I'm white, but I have soul."

Swinging With Indy

More Trailer Leakage: Indy's Back! (Again.)

Indy's Back, And He's Ready for The White Party!

• WATCH VIDEO

Lucas And Spielberg Given Hefty Chunk Of Indy's Possibly Saggy Back-End

Hard as it is to believe, after what seems like 19 endless years of false-starts and "Slowly Veering Lincoln Continental of Doom" jokes, we are less than one month away from seeing the fourth chapter of the Indiana Jones saga. The adventuresome archaeologist enters a far different Hollywood from the days when he first planted sunbeam-focusing scepters in secret map rooms, however; studio sash-tightening has required its makers to defer their fees in exchange for that venerable Hollywood trade-off, a piece (and in this case, a gigantic piece) of the back-end. The LAT breaks down Crystal Skull's financial model:

Paramount spent about $185 million to make the movie and will pay at least $150 million to market it worldwide. The studio will earn a distribution fee of 12.5% of the revenue it receives from the film's release in all media, including theaters, DVD and television.

Steven Spielberg Mulls Canceling The Internet To Preserve An Unspoiled Moviegoing Experience

It's been a rough week for you, the Internet-Enabled Movie Fan with Something to Say. Just a day after noted haimishe Luddite Barry Sonnenfeld's semi-hysterical vision of a Facebook-infiltrated culture in which Big Brother will monitor our every Twittered activity, comes a similarly technophobic EW.com conversation with the creative duo behind the Indiana Jones series (and possessors of 68.2% of all the world's wealth), Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Playing a sort of good cop/bad cop routine, Spielberg bemoans the eroding of the moviegoing experience by keyboard-tapping chatterboxes, while Lucas tempers all the grumpy-old-man talk by pointing out that the internet is also capable of producing some good things (e.g. an audience who actually cares what Indy has been up to after his 19-year sabbatical). We quietly slip in mid-conversation:

STEVEN SPIELBERG: It really is important to be able to point out that the Internet is still filled with more speculation than facts. The Internet isn't really about facts. It's about people's wishful thinking, based on a scintilla of evidence that allows their imaginations to springboard. And that's fine.

Harrison Ford Disappointed To Learn Slime Contains No Alcohol

George Lucas Cannot Caution Enough Against Setting Your 'Crystal Skull' Hopes Too High

George Lucas is still traumatized by the sullen faces of Star Wars fans who filed out of the first preview screenings of The Phantom Menace, and, spotting its jittery director standing by the exit, spit, "You ruined Christmas, my childhood, and Life Day!" before whipping their crumpled comments cards at his head. So it's not terribly surprising to learn that the producer of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is taking a far more tempered, "Hey, Indy fans: Let's just try to remember this is just a movie...and the originals weren't even that great to begin with!"-approach to his latest revisiting of a devoutly worshiped franchise:

"When you do a movie like this, a sequel that's very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it's going to be the Second Coming," Lucas says.

Shia On His First Time

After being subjected to a tribunal of fanboy elders, the accompanying poster has been verified as royal Lucas portraitist Drew Struzan's official one sheet for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Bearing all the hallmarks of a great Indy poster, our only quibble was that it left us wondering how a Latino version of the most dynamic member of the What's Happening!! cast figures into the action of Crystal Skull, as we have no recollection of a Mexican Rerun having appeared in the film's trailer.

• IndianaJones.com

Cannes Audiences To Be First To Declare Harrison Ford Too Old For This Shit

With anticipation-levels for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hovering somewhere around those of that other long-awaited sequel, Jesus Christ and the Second Coming, Paramount has arranged for the latest chapter of Steven Spielberg's adventure serial to get a suitably overblown premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18. Reports Variety:

That's four days before "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" opens day-and-date worldwide May 22.

'Crystal Skull' Trailer Released: Pretty Much Your Father's Indiana Jones

Lo And Behold, It's The Crystal Skull

Trumping the recent online publication of a photo depicting Harrison Ford meaningfully standing atop some crates in a warehouse, Movieweb is offering a sneak peak at Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull's titular Mysterious Artifact, an object whose secret has previously been so fiercely guarded that two unfortunate souls have paid for their spoiler-pushing crimes with their freedom and careers. We must admit that the actual skull (assuming, of course, the photo is genuine) is far more menacing than the bedazzled knick-knack we'd long envisioned.