Mike Fleming broke the news this afternoon that Daniel Craig has signed on the line which is dotted to play the male lead in the upcoming American film version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” In case you never set foot in your local Barnes and Noble outlet, that’s the first novel in so-called Millennium Trilogy of mystery thrillers by the late Swedish author/political activist Steig Larsson. The series is becoming a sort of adult/non-geek HarryPotter for the Trader Joe’s set and the first U.S. film of it has attracted the powerhouse twosome of writer Steve Zallian and director David Fincher.

Judging from having seen the solid, but not excessively over-awesome, Swedish film version of the novel (which I’m really going to have to try and read at some point), Craig is probably a much better choice than the earlier floated Brad Pitt for the part. 007 or not, it’s just easier to see Craig as a down on his luck journo. Also, as Fleming points out, this puts Craig in the unique position of having at least two and, if you count a potentially huge “Cowboys and Aliens,” possibly three franchises to keep busy and well-compensated. Craig is not only an extremely good actor, he’s apparently got some very good agents.

* I’m sure Marvel’s Kevin Feige has many good qualities and I’m a fan of honesty, in general. However, trying to position his absurdly blunt and needless public dissing of Edward Norton regarding his departure from portraying the Hulk/Bruce Banner as somehow helpful in negotiating with Mark Ruffalo just doesn’t convince me he was being anything other than thoughtless. Also, he loses whatever honesty points he might have built up by claiming there’s no bad blood between him and Norton. None? Is Norton the Dalai Lama of ambitious writer-actor-producers? He’d have to be to have no resentments towards Feige.

* Oliver Stone, half-Jewish himself, is trying to dig himself out of a verbal hole when some comments seemed to allude to that old canard, “Jewish domination of the media.” You know, I think Stone has made an idiot of himself in many different ways with statements here and there (I haven’t seen his recent documentary, “South of the Border,” so I won’t comment on it) but I will add that his critic, Abraham Foxman of the formerly righteous Anti-Defamation League could easily defeat Stone in any game of verbal political idiocy, any day of the week. There’s this highly incorrect idea out there that Jewish people are somehow smarter than average. If so, why are so many of us putzes?

* I’m not great at reading business tea leaves, but something interesting seems to be going on with Ryan Kavanaugh of Relativity Media, who has added to his purchase of Rogue Films with another purchase of Overture and is now talking about an IPO, which means stocks and other important things that nevertheless tend to make my eyes glaze over. To give you an idea of why Kavanaugh is interesting in a way that worries me slightly, read this Esquire piece from last year. It’s hard to imagine movies being treated any more like products than they already are.

* Boy, would I like to ignore the latest Roman Polanski story. Obviously, if this newest accusation is true, his career really should be over or, at least, conducted entirely in the pokey, but Polanski is obviously also a target that makes him vulnerable to baseless allegations as well as correct ones. Who knows which this is? If you think you do,  you’re wrong.

* The musical stage version of Pedro Almodovar’s 1988 breakthrough Spanish-language homage to classic era Hollywood farces and sex comedies, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” which among other things featured the great Carmen Maura and launched the international career of Antonio Banderas, seems to be going forward. It’s one movie that pretty cries out to become a musical comedy and, also, I just wanted to end on a story that didn’t nauseate me.

Complaints about summer box have evaporated with the release of well-marketed movies that people seem to actually like. Weird. Leading the pack is the PG-rated animated family comedy, “Despicable Me,” which starring voice Steve Carell has been madly promoting everywhere. The zany villain-centric tale has also benefited, as per Anthony D’Alessandro, from the usual cross-promotional synergies which are as diabolical yet effective as the words are annoying to write/read.

The 3-D animation nearly doubled the already healthy amounts that I mentioned Friday and scored a weekend estimate of over $60.1 million today according to Box Office Mojo. It’s a much needed break for troubled Universal which is launching a new animation division with the film from two French first-time feature directors.

Coming in at #2 was a quite decent second weekend for Summit’s “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.” The PG-13 rated female tween-teen-young-adult attracting flick suffered an average drop of about 48% and brought home about $33.4 million worth of estimated bacon.

The blood quotient rises considerably for the third genre flick in this week’s lineup, “Predators.” The action-horror pic, which according Jason Zingale, contains an unlucky character who is literally filleted, is apparently being greeted as a bloody good time for action/horror/creature-feature fans and brought in $25.3 million, just a tad higher than the higher end of expectations. That’s especially good considering the remarkably low budget by current action-film standards, $39 million, thanks to the cost-cutting genius of producer Robert Rodriguez and, one assumes, the efficient work of director Nimrod Antal.

(Some of us geeks will remember the praise Joss Whedon generated from making his space-action flick, “Serenity” for $40 million — and shooting the movie entirely in the greater Los Angeles area — back in 2005. Us “Firefly” fans would have been a whole lot happpier with $25 million  than the very disappointing $10 million it’s first weekend actually generated. Damn you people for thinking the movie had something to do with spas or adult diapers.)

Following close behind is the latest leggy smash from Pixar/Disney. “Toy Story 3” generated $22 million in its fourth week, having already earned $140 million over its admittedly enormous (but no longer unusually large) budget of $200 million. I’m sure a lot of that is largely probably due to one of the highest paid voice casts in entertainment history, considering not only the status of Tom Hanks and, to a vastly lesser extent, Tim Allen, but also the enormous success of the prior films. Also, this level of CGI animation appears to be a pricey proposition, still.

Last week’s very successful #2 film, the critically-loathed and C Cinemascore family-action pic, “The Last Airbender” dropped 57% in its second week to this week’s #5 spot. That is actually a fairly typical, though not great, drop for a genre film. Still, with a $150 million budget, critical nightmares of this TV-animation adaptation becoming a long-running live-action film series may remain the stuff of dreams.

Meanwhile, expectations are also being exceeded in limited release. “The Kids are Alright” got the best per-screen average not only of the week but of the year with a whopping per screen of over $72,000 on seven screens. Also opening this week in a very large for limited 110 theater release was the second film of Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, which is quickly emerging as something of an international Harry Potter phenom for over-educated grown-ups. “The Girl Who Played with Fire” made it to the #11 spot with $965,000 estimated despite muted reviews. “Cyrus” continues to do very well, also.

There’s more. As usual, the details as compiled by Peter Knegt are over at Indiewire.

* It nice to lead with some good news. Jailed Iranian director Jafar Panahi has reportedly been released on bail from his imprisonment. The director, who was supposed to sit on the Cannes jury, had been on a hunger strike. The acclaimed film-maker appears to be in trouble because of a documentary about the Iranian protest movement.

* The lower than expected box office performance for “Shrek Forever After” had an effect on Wall Street. Moreover, Patrick Goldstein wonders if those inflated 3-D ticket prices might already be starting to backfire. I tend to agree. People may not mind paying a little extra for something that feels like a real event, but 3-D is already starting to feel old hat and, as Goldstein reminds us, there’s a lot more coming.

* This story fell between the cracks a few days back — and Louis Black doesn’t work for me — but Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me“) really is doing that comicon documentary that was rumored sometime back. It was originally plugged as a collaboration of some sort with Joss Whedon, but it turns out Whedon is just one of a few geek superstars who will be executive producing. That’ possibly the most elastic job title in show business, so his involvement could be fairly minimal though I’m sure he’ll appear on screen. Accompanying Whedon in backing the film are none other than Stan Lee and Harry Knowles.

* A long time ago, I found the novel, Less Than Zero, oddly compelling reading in that it was a vivid portrait of a human train wreck. That being said, Brett Easton Ellis is certainly not dispelling the widespread opinion that he might be a jackass with his pronouncements about female directors. May he shortly be visited by the ghost of Ida Lupino.

* The real winner at Cannes: Eliot Spitzer.

* Call me a luddite old fogey with terrible hand-eye coordination, but I can’t get excited about movies based on videogames. Nevertheless, Warner Brothers disagrees and is starting things up on a film version of “Mass Effect.”

* Speaking of movies based on video games, apparently “Hitman” — a movie I’ve never heard anyone say they liked — made enough cash to instigate a sequel. Yay.

* Note to Kim Masters and her mysterious “talent representative.” The reason Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy aren’t as popular as they once were has nothing to do with the Internet or “dumbing down.” It has a lot to do with their failure to make funny and/or good movies. It eventually gets to you.  I do agree with producer David Friendly that “the concept is becoming the star.” That, in a way, is as it should be.

* If you’ve got some time, you should check out the really good and really long New York Times piece about the late author of the latest hot book-based franchise, Steig Larsson of The Millenium Trilogy. The very decent Swedish film version of the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which believe it or not combines classical style mystery/detective fiction with blunt portrayals of sexual abuse and a character partially inspired by Pippi Longstocking, is already a huge international hit. A big-star laden American version is coming, perhaps with Brad Pitt.  And the books are just one element of Larsson’s fascinating and somewhat tragic life. Anne Thompson has more on the film, in particular.

* If he didn’t provide the links to back himself up, I’d wonder what the Filmdrunk was imbibing, but apparently Martin Scorsese thinks that Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro would be good as the older Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, respectively, for his long delayed film about the Rat Pack. Perhaps fortunately, it’s destined to be delayed a bit longer as Scorsese has a lot on his plate right now.

* I know nobody really cares, but just for the record, “The Switch,” based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, will not be a prequel.  Not really. The book “Jackie Brown” was based on, Rum Punch, was a sequel. The movie might be “blessed” by Quentin Tarantino, whatever that means, but it sounds as if it will have no real connection to the terrific Tarantino film, which Leonard has said is his favorite adaptation of one of his books.

Since this solid, actually quite conventional, though rather sordid and, for some, disturbing mystery thriller did extremely well all over the world, and it hasn’t done badly here, it’s naturally being remade. It’s being given a rather royal treatment, with director David Fincher returning to familiar murderous territory and Steve Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”) writing and producing. Currently young actresses including Ellen Page, Carrie Mulligan, and Natalie Portman‘s name are being bandied about for the title role, though an unknown is also perhaps a possibility. They do need someone very good, I can tell you that.

The male lead — a schlumpish middle-aged dude in the Danish film — has apparently been offered to Brad Pitt, who is middle-aged but very Brad Pitt-like. For it to work, he might have to put on some weight or something as it’s an oddball romance of sorts and it’s no longer so oddball if a handsome movie-star guy shows up.