‘Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins’ will start production today. But they won’t be head bashing and f-in all over the place. The team is targeting a PG-13 rating, following the ‘Die Hard’ franchise that went in the same direction last year.

With $1.03 billion by the first three R-rated movies, the production company Halcyon Co. thinks the quadrilogy is ready to broaden its audience. And with the wider audience comes the possibility for more merchandise. “Our merchandising program will be the largest to date for The Terminator,” Derek Anderson of Halcyon Co. said. And they aren’t planning on making the same crappy movie licensed games either. “The first three games were all bad,” Anderson said. “The core fans are screaming for something fresh; they won’t be just playing the movie.“

All big words for a company that bought the rights to the ‘Terminator’ franchise just last year. But when you read the firm is financed by hedge funds, I’m not sure what to think. The one thing the movie has going for it, is the participation of Christian Bale. But maybe they just threw him a bag of money too.

New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo is backing a law that will make recording a movie a misdemeanor for first-time offenders. Doing so could get you up to one year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Doing it again could turn it into a felony, with even higher penalties. Cuomo noted 140,000 jobs are lost because of piracy annually and as stated many times before by the MPAA, it cost the film industry over $6 billion in 2005.

If you get caught recording a movie now, it’s equal to a misdemeanor, like getting a parking ticket. But this new bill is not here to stop the average kid from recording a movie. “This is modern-day organized crime,” Cuomo said. “The wide distribution of pirated films originating from New York costs our state vital economic resources, including thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenue.“

The only thing we didn’t have was an official word from Marvel, but now we have it. ‘Iron Man 2′ has been confirmed for April 30, 2010. Jon Favreau and his crew already hinted at how they’d like to do a sequel. They said it in like every other interview last week. If it wasn’t for the possible actors’ strike, they might have already been working on it. But Marvel didn’t want to take any risks by setting the release date for next summer.

Marvel Entertainment stock jumped almost 10% as we expected, but settled to around 7.5% later in the day. This while the market was down overall, mostly caused by the failed Yahoo deal and concerns about mortgage lender Countrywide’s suitor backing out as well.

In 2006, Marvel Entertainment started raising $525 million to produce its own movies. Before that it was only licensing its characters, like ‘Spider-man’ to Sony. Their second film will be ‘The Incredible Hulk’ in June and the third will be the just announced ‘Iron Man’ sequel. Marvel also announced their fourth feature called ‘Thor,’ which is planned for June 4, 2010. They sure like their summer season.

Was there even a critic that did like ‘Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed’? Words as ‘propaganda,’ ‘insulting,’ ‘brainwashing’ and ‘hysterical’ were used to describe this documentary. Jokes about its subtitle and just plain ridiculing made this a movie nobody in their right mind would watch. Right? Wrong!

While it does have a metacritic.com score of 2.0, it still managed to make $6.6 million including last weekend. This makes it the 13th highest grossing documentary in the US. “It’s done exceptionally well when you look at it as a documentary film,” producer Mark Mathis said.

He blames the media for not getting more people to see his movie. “Michael Moore comes out with a film and Michael Moore gets large amounts of time on morning shows –- NBC, ABC, CBS, cable networks. He gets tens of millions of dollars of free publicity because Big Media see the world in general the way he does.“

Can you really blame the media for not picking up on what most describe as the worst movie of the year? He should be happy the little controversy made him the $6.6 million. I didn’t see the movie, but as I understand it, it wasn’t worth a penny of that $6.6 million. At least you can accuse Michael Moore of some objectivity.

With ‘Sex and the City: The Movie’ tracking to be the hottest movie this summer, first talks about a sequel have begun. “I feel like we could release a second movie just based on stuff that we’ve cut out of this movie,” Cynthia Nixon said. “We were [at such a] breakneck speed to get this first movie out, I don’t know if there would be a second one, but it’s not up to me.” And while this is true, if the forecasts are right, there will be a second movie, because when there’s money there’s a movie.

Last week Moviefone released the results of their survey with over 420,000 respondents. ‘Sex and the City: The Movie’ was leading this questionnaire with 32% looking forward to the movie. Very impressive for a movie that cost only $65 million to produce, compared to about 10 movies that crossed the $100 million this summer.

‘Sex and the City: The Movie’ will premiere in London, May 28.

Taking a little preview of what’s to come at our weekly box office roundup, here’s what happened this weekend. If you’ve been reading the site, you definitely know about ‘Iron Man’ crushing its competition. So let’s not talk about that. But if we take a look at number two, we see ‘Made of Honor’ still made a decent $15.5 million. I say decent, because with a $40 million budget, Columbia Pictures can’t be too happy about it. A metacritic.com score of 3.7 didn’t help and probably got some girls to join their boyfriend to see ‘Iron Man’ instead.

Others may have chosen to see ‘Baby Mama,’ which was received a little better by the critics last week. It made another $10 million this weekend, making it profitable if you don’t consider marketing.

We already saw how ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ was going to have better legs in our weekly box office roundup. And it managed to top ‘Harold & Kumar 2′ in its third weekend, with a big $6 million. ‘Harold & Kumar 2′ is probably having its last good week, also doing $6 million. Not that New Line Cinema should be sad about it. The movie already did twice their budget of $12 million and is tracking to do double of what its prequel did.

This weekend the news broke about Seth MacFarlane making a deal to get him ‘paid exorbitantly’ for making ‘Family Guy’ and such. But now it seems this deal includes ‘Family Guy: The Movie.’ Or should I say ‘Family Guy: The Movie 2.’ Because didn’t we already see a ‘Family Guy’ movie? As far as I know it went straight to DVD and frankly, it wasn’t that great.

Since the return of ‘Family Guy’ after its cancellation, I’m not really into it anymore. Maybe the jokes worked out on me. I would still see the movie, but I feel like they’re just long TV episodes. That’s what ‘The Simpsons Movie’ was for me. And a big cash in for its creators of course, making over $500 million worldwide. Not to mention all the merchandize deals they made.

I only feel ‘South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut’ was something different than the TV series. But I’m not sure how ‘Family Guy’ could create this atmosphere. Maybe they tried with the straight-to-DVD I mentioned above, but later felt it wasn’t worth a theatrical release. DVD is the best market for ‘Family Guy’ and maybe that’s where it should stay.

Already getting sick of all the ‘Iron Man’ coverage? Well, wait a couple of days. We will be all over how bad ‘Speed Racer’ is doing. But for now, let’s take a closer look at how ‘Iron Man’ did globally.

As we already know it made $96.8 million overseas at 57 territories and 7,500 screens. But what was the number two territory after the US? That’s right, the ones with the English dialect, the UK with $10.3 million. Followed closely by our Mexican friends with $9.6 million. In third, quite surprising, came South Korea. It was the biggest launch in South Korea for 2008 and even double of what ‘Spider-man’ did at its launch.

Fourth to sixth were France with $7.1, Spain with $6.2 and Brazil with $6 million. All this is even more impressive when you consider ‘Iron Man’ was unknown to most people outside the US. They would have met the iron man the first time seeing the trailer.

‘Iron Man’ is expected to be able to surpass $300 million overseas. Which would make it one of the more successful comic book movies outside the US.