Word: million
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Willis. That was supposed to be a recipe for minting money. Yet Surrogates, with Willis in a dual role as a futurist FBI agent and his platinum-blond servo, fizzled, while the 3-D animated feature Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs sizzled. The Sony cartoon pulled in $24.6 million to win the box-office weekend, according to early official studio estimates. Other segments of the potential audience may have renounced moviegoing - attending to more manly pursuits like watching football games and begging God's forgiveness - but moms and their kids went, or went back, to the CGI fable about...
Surrogates, which industry handicappers had touted to win the weekend with a gross in the $20 million-plus range, just didn't have the legs to beat the spread. The new movie's intriguing premise - of a world in which people stay at home while their lifelike robots do all the work - virtually told audiences that this was one to catch, if at all, on DVD. And Willis, except for his fourth dip into the Die Hard franchise two years ago, hasn't come near blockbuster status in the past decade. Reports of friction between the star and his director...
...other new releases fell below even Surrogates' wan totals. Dennis Quaid flopped with Pandorum ($4.4 million), yet another sci-fi movie starring an actor in his mid-50s. Nor is the remake of Fame gonna live forever: its third-place finish of $10 million was one more underperformer. Among the holdovers, only Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All by Myself showed any staying power. The Jennifer Aniston romance ($4.3 million) was a box-office wallflower. And how lifeless is the femme horror comedy Jennifer's Body ($3.5 million)? In her host monologue on Saturday Night Live this weekend...
...height of the civil war in Iraq, a tidal wave of refugees crossed the border into Syria, changing the face of the capital, Damascus, with their clothing, accents and shell-shocked appearances. Years later, many of the 1.5 million Iraqis remaining in Syria have become a part of the fabric of life. Many own homes or businesses and have children who speak Arabic with a Syrian accent. But one sector of the immigrant population still feels ill at ease: the 400,000 or so Iraqis with ties to the former regime of Saddam Hussein...
...Syria is not about to hand over former Baathists for prosecution, either. Syrian officials point out that their country protected many members of the current Iraqi government when they were exiled by Saddam, including Maliki himself, who spent 20 years in Damascus. "There are [now] 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria," Fayssal Mekdad, Syria's Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs tells TIME. "When they came here we didn't ask them what party they belonged to. We just opened our doors...