One thing about the weekend box office is certain: For the first time, Daniel Radcliff’s latest movie will not wind up at the end of the year vying for the title of the biggest opening gross of 2012. In fact, it’s not at all certain that The Woman in Black will even land on top this weekend. Competing with the Super Bowl on Sunday and a well-reviewed science fiction movie, Chronicle, on all three days, the film is expected to earn no more than $10-15 million. As of Friday, box office forecasters were giving it a slight edge over Chronicle, starring newcomers Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan and Michael Kelly. (The studios releasing the two low-budget films, CBS Films and Fox respectively, are predicting far more conservative results than the pundits.) A third film, Big Miracle, starring Drew Barrymore as a Greenpeace worker in Alaska mobilizing an Alaskan town to save three ice-trapped whales, is aimed at attracting women and kids who aren’t interested in staying at home to watch the big game. It’s likely to earn $7-9 million, according to forecasters.

UPDATE: Box-office forecasters’ low expectations appeared totally out-of-whack as Friday’s ticket sales came in well above the highest predictions. Chronicle earned an estimated $8.65 million, while Woman in Black took in about $8.3 million. Big Miracle came in on par with forecasts, earning an estimated $2.46 million.

On his Twitter posts, Rupert Murdoch has remained oddly silent about the latest developments involving News Corp’s hacking scandal(s) in the U.K. While mentioning the latest market moves by Facebook and Google and remarking, “Things are buzzing,” Murdoch today (Friday) said nothing at all about the buzz over reports on Thursday that a crucial email exchange in which his son James was told about widespread hacking by company lawyers was deleted from his computer after the scandal broke. Nor is there any mention about another report that police are investigating the possibility that reporters for Murdoch’s London Times had hacked into an email account of an anonymous blogger who turned out to be a police officer. The Leveson inquiry, which is looking into the telephone hacking incidents as part of an overall probe of journalistic ethics in the U.K., has summoned the newspaper’s editor, James Harding, to answer questions about the allegations. In a letter to Scotland Yard, Tom Watson, the member of Parliament who has spearheaded the hacking investigation, said, “I must ask that you investigate computer hacking at The Times. In so doing you will also be able to establish whether perjury or conspiracy to pervert the course of justice have also occurred.”

Just when it seemed virtually certain that Donald Trump was about to quit television and run for president on a third-party ticket, he has up and changed his mind — opting instead to endorse Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination. The endorsement surprised a good number of political analysts — especially since most had suspected that if Trump endorsed any candidate at all, it would be Newt Gingrich. But suspicions quickly arose that he had struck a closed-door deal with Romney — that in exchange for the endorsement, Romney would agree to appoint him Secretary of State if he is elected in November. In a telephone interview today (Friday) with TMZ.com, Trump said, “I’d rather have me negotiating against China, against OPEC and against lots of other people that are laughing at how stupid we are … I would rather have me negotiating for us than the clowns that are negotiating right now.” Meanwhile, another celebrity has entered the presidential race. Roseanne Barr on Thursday filed papers to become a candidate for president under the Green Party standard. If the Green Party should nominate her, her entry into the race could pose a problem for NBC, which is developing a new sitcom for her, Downwardly Mobile. Under the FCC’s Equal Time rule, she could not appear on the program before the November election without NBC being required to offer equal time to her opponents.

In what seems on the surface to be a clash between the board of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the trustees of the AFTRA Health and Retirement Funds, the trustees on Thursday said that the written opinion by the boards of AFTRA and the Screen Actors Guild that found little difficulty — and much to recommend — about merging the H&R plans, is not necessarily shared by the trustees. Even though the union’s review of the matter included a written opinion by Jani Rachelson, co-counsel to the AFTRA H&R fund, the trustees said, they “did not request or authorize this opinion of Fund co-counsel and had no prior knowledge of this letter before reading the posting on the websites.” In fact, the trustees maintained, merging the two unions’ plans would represent a significant hurdle. “The merger of pension and health funds as large and divergent as the AFTRA and SAG plans raises complex and unique financial, legal and benefit issues which can only be addressed through a comprehensive analysis performed by the funds,” the trustees said. “No position has been, or will be, taken by the AFTRA Health & Retirement Funds Trustees or its co-counsel until such time as a comprehensive feasibility study is performed.” In the past, efforts to merge the two talent unions have collapsed under the weight of opposition to proposals to merge the H&R plans — but most of that opposition has come from SAG members, not AFTRA.

For the second week in a row, CBS’s The Big Bang Theory has outscored Fox’s American Idol in the 8:00-8:30 p.m. half-hour among total adults and adults 18-49. According to Nielsen Media Research, the sitcom on Thursday attracted 16.4 million viewers versus 15.8 million for the talent contest. That number for Idol was 24 percent lower than it was a year ago for the comparable episode. Nevertheless, the rating for Idol‘s entire hour-long telecast was higher than any other show’s. Another problem for Fox: its new Howie Mandel-hosted Mobbed lost 40 percent of Idol‘s audience at 9:00 p.m. and dropped the network to No. 2 in that hour.

There will be something other than the Super Bowl that will be super this weekend. A movie about three dorky Seattle teenagers — the sort who would never be seen dead in front of a TV set on Super Sunday — who are suddenly gifted with super powers. Chronicle begins when they discover a crystalline meteor that gives them those powers — and their new ability to float objects and levitate makes for some thrilling experiences — but they also produce moral dilemmas for the kids, and the movie, says Amy Biancolli in the San Francisco Chronicle turns “its wobbly eye on the corrupting force of unshackled and unlimited strength.” Director Josh Trank, she says, “tells his tale with an emotional and visual crispness that gives the superhero genre its best crack at naturalism so far.” Manohla Dargis of the New York Times applauds the script by Max Landis — son of director John Landis, of Animal House and An American Werewolf in London fame — which focuses on how the boys’ powers “eventually lead to a battle between untamed will and choice.” It’s a “thrillingly inventive take on an old genre, a fun story that turns increasingly dark, a nerd-boy fantasy realized with cinematic flair,” comments Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The movie, writes Ty Burr in the Boston Globe, can be “simultaneously ridiculous and wonderful. It honors a zillion low-budget monster movies that have come before while feeding into a zillion more adolescent fantasies of anger, power, and self-pity.” It’s all told Blair Witch style: one of the boys is video recording his experiences. And, says Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times, “There are times when the filmmakers seem to have written themselves into a corner. Whether by design or not, the way they deal with it is by relying on ‘technical issues’ with Andrew’s camera — just letting the screen go dark. … Frankly, that’s a technique we should hope catches on; it would have vastly improved any number of recent films.” But Mark Jenkins in the Washington Post largely dismisses the movie’s premise and its execution. “The characters are introduced so quickly and their personalities are so thin, that what happens to them has little weight,” he remarks. Kyle Smith in the New York Post is even more dismissive. What the movie really is all about, he suggests, “is the power to supersuck.” But then that was pretty much the reaction of critics to the first movie John Landis made when he was about his son’s age. Critics pretty much agreed that it lived up to its name — Schlock. In his review in the Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert predicts that Max Landis and the other talent behind the cameras and in front of them will make their mark in the business. “Sometimes a movie arrives out of the blue that announces the arrival of considerable new talents,” he writes.

The reviews for Daniel Radcliffe’s first post-Harry Potter film are decidedly mixed. The Woman in Black is a period piece, a ghost story and a stage for Radcliffe to prove that he can transform himself into a far different character than Harry. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times suggests that he has only partially succeeded in doing so. “The ghost of Potter past hovers in his every gesture,” she writes. “It will take time before many of us will be able to see the actor instead of his famous character, and time for him to shake that role off too.” Yet she praises his ability to keep “the story steadily moving forward inch by inch, shiver by shiver.” Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times figures it might have been a mistake to cast Radcliffe in a role that might well have been more believably executed by an older actor with more gravitas. “At 22, he still looks like a schoolboy,” he remarks. “The movie nevertheless is effective,” he says, “because director James Watkins knows it isn’t a character study. His haunted house is the star.” Peter Howell in the Toronto Star agrees. “It’s a haunted-house shocker where the frights are foremost, especially the jumpy kind (there are a few good ones), and acting is almost beside the point. We quickly stop thinking about Harry,” he observes. Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe didn’t stop thinking about Radcliffe’s indelible icon, however. Radcliffe, he suggests, has opted to play a role in which his character is all “seriousness and suffering. It’s how we we know he’s a man. (He’s even grown stubble for this part.) … But we don’t need any more prematurely old men in movies about lost souls.” The Associated Press’s Jake Coyle disagrees with Ebert and Morris. “Radcliffe looks respectably adult,” he says. Coyle, too, has much praise for director Watkins. “It’s obvious he’s interested in using fright for more than just shock,” he writes. The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips’s take on Radcliffe: “Quite good. I’d say he’s on his way as a post-Potter entity.” The film itself: “a handsome nerve-jangler … [that] amps up the scares without turning them into something completely stupid.” Most of the critics agree that the movie has audiences jumping out of their seats time and again. But John Anderson in the Wall Street Journal calls Watkins scare tactics “shameless” and concludes, “A movie can only cry ‘Boo!’ so many times before the victim runs out of patience.”

Fox’s American Idol drew 18.19 million viewers Wednesday night. That was more than all of the other broadcast networks drew combined, but it was still way off previous seasons’ numbers. Among adults 18-49 ratings were down 9 percent from last Wednesday and down a whopping 34 percent from the comparable week a year ago, according to TVbytheNumbers.com. For its third installment on Wednesday night a year ago, the talent contest drew 25.16 million total viewers, but a good number of those may have been tuning in out of curiosity to see how new judges Steven Tyler and Jennifer Lopez were adapting to their roles as judges. Nevertheless, the decline in ratings may be worrisome for Fox, which no doubt guaranteed advertisers ratings similar to last year’s and may be forced to give them free “make goods” if ratings don’t substantially improve.

Television networks often resort to chicanery and devious manipulation to boost the ratings of some lackluster shows, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing as a flagrant example the decision of ABC to label Good Morning America a “special” and identify it to ratings researcher Nielsen as Good Morning Amer during the final week of the year, a week when all morning shows are notoriously low-rated. The apparent intent, the Times suggested, was to prevent ratings for that final week to affect GMA’s overall average for the year. “This is the kind of programming sleight of hand that executives seize on as they seek to gain every possible edge in the television ratings game,” the Times commented. NBC, it noted, used the opposite tactic recently when it aired a Republican primary debate in place of the normally low-rated Rock Center with Brian Williams. It simply retained the name Rock Center and in one fell swoop boosted the season’s average ratings for the newsmagazine slightly. “And,” added the Times, “especially at the bottom-rated NBC, that matters.”

OneMillionMoms.com, a unit of the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s Christian conservative American Family Association, has launched a campaign against the J.C. Penney stores to pressure the department-store chain to replace Ellen Degeneres as its spokesperson. “Funny that JC Penney thinks hiring an open homosexual spokesperson will help their business when most of their customers are traditional families,” the group said on its website. It warned, “The majority of JC Penney shoppers will be offended and choose to no longer shop there. The small percentage of customers they are attempting to satisfy will not offset their loss in sales.” Thus far, the company has not commented on the protest (which likely has not embraced one million moms). But in announcing Degeneres’ selection, J.C. Penny CEO Ron Johnson said, “I think Ellen is someone we all trust. She’s lovable, likable, honest and funny, but at her soul, we trust her.”