Movie News & Gossip

NEW YORK - It's fair to say that it's a risky venture to create a movie about an exotically colored, 10-foot-tall tribe called the Na'vi and spend more money making it than any other film in the history of Hollywood.

Yet investing hundreds of millions of dollars in James Cameron's "Avatar" (exact figures aren't available but the total cost, including marketing, is expected to run close to half a billion dollars) is a bet likely to pay off for 20th Century Fox.

LOS ANGELES - With more fads than folks at an "American Idol" audition, the past decade has been a difficult time to culturally define. One day, everyone was updating their MySpace profiles while sporting Ugg boots and sipping cosmopolitans. The next, they were creating Facebook pages while donning Ed Hardy T-shirts and downing energy drinks.

Superheroes, disaster movies, reality TV, professional wrestling and a boy wizard named Harry Potter weathered the decade's ever-changing pop culture storm while others rode the aughts like a roller coaster. Britney Spears was in, then out, then in again, advantageously morphing herself from teen queen to train wreck to pop diva within the 10-year span.

LOS ANGELES - Hollywood picked the right decade to go over the rainbow.

In an era that brought harsh reality home with the war on terror and an economy gone bust, Hollywood became more of a dream factory than ever, embracing fantastic escapism at a time when audiences needed it most.

VERACRUZ, Mexico - A Mexican governor says Mel Gibson will make a movie at a prison in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz next year.

Veracruz Gov. Fidel Herrera says part of the Ignacio Allende prison will be emptied in January "because a grand production will be filmed there with our friend, the actor and producer Mel Gibson."