Newsmakers

newsmakers

‘Lion King’ chases off Brad Pitt to stay at No. 1

LOS ANGELES

Brad Pitt was unable to put the cat out of first place at the weekend box office.

Walt Disney’s “The Lion King” reissue was No. 1 for the second-straight weekend with $22.1 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. That puts it just ahead of Pitt’s baseball drama “Moneyball,” a Sony Pictures release that opened at No. 2 with $20.6 million.

Debuting closely behind at No. 3 was the Warner Bros. family film “Dolphin Tale” with $20.3 million. “Dolphin Tale” stars Harry Connick Jr., Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman.

The 3-D reissue of 1994’s “The Lion King” has taken in $61.7 million since opening the previous weekend to a much-bigger audience than expected. That’s on top of nearly $800 million worldwide the movie made in its original run and a 2002 re-release.

The film has done so well that Disney plans to leave it in theaters longer than the two-week run the studio initially planned as a prelude to its Blu-ray home-video debut Oct. 4, said Dave Hollis, Disney’s head of distribution.

The studio has not yet decided how long or how widely the film would play theatrically after the Blu-ray release, Hollis said.

Turkey: Museum returns top of statue

ANKARA, Turkey

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts returned a piece of a Hercules statue to Turkey after two decades of negotiations, the country’s prime minister said Sunday.

Turkey claimed the top of the Weary Heracles, Greek for Hercules, was stolen from an archaeological site in the Mediterranean and smuggled into the U.S. The bottom half of the statue has been displayed in Turkey.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he brought the top of the statue on his plane back home Sunday after the Boston art museum agreed to return it as a “goodwill gesture.”

The 1,900-year-old marble statue shows the tired hero leaning on his club. It stands about 5 feet high.

The upper half was held jointly by the Museum of Fine Arts and husband-and-wife collectors Leon Levy and Shelby White of New York. The lower half is in the Antalya Museum in Turkey, along with photos of the Boston section and copies of articles about it from Turkish and American newspapers.

Turkish officials brought a cast of the bottom half to Boston in 1992 to show the pieces fit together. They said the top half of the statue was stolen in 1980 from an excavation site in Perge, northeast of the Mediterranean resort city of Antalya and 340 miles south of the capital, Ankara.

Powell leadership book due out in 2012

NEW YORK

Colin Powell’s new book is a story of success.

The retired four-star general and former secretary of state has a deal with HarperCollins for “It Worked for Me: Lessons in Leadership and Life.”

According to Harper-Collins, the book will include his 13 rules of leadership and “revealing personal stories.”

Financial terms were not disclosed. HarperCollins announced Sunday that the book was scheduled for release in May 2012.

One of Powell’s rules, “Get mad, then get over it,” will be tested in his book. HarperCollins spokeswoman Tina Andreadis declined to comment on whether Powell would respond to criticisms in recent memoirs by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld or former Vice President Dick Cheney, both of whom Powell often clashed with while in the George W. Bush administration.

Cheney’s “In My Time” noted their differences about the Iraq war and alleged that Powell was reluctant to express himself in Cabinet meetings. Powell since has said that Cheney’s book included “cheap shots.”

Associated Press