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SCARY MOVIE, WHAT LIES BENEATH and CHARLIE'S ANGELS all held strong at the international box office. In Italy, SCARY MOVIE debuted at #1 with a strong gross of US$2.28 million. Dropping a lofty 59%, X-MEN fell to sixth, grossing $466,646, thereby lifting its Italian cume to $4.1 million. In seventh, FREQUENCY channeled $460,570 in its Italian premiere. In France, SCARY MOVIE held onto the top spot with a gross of $2.32 million, raising its cume to $15.24 million. The French debut of SHAFT, therefore, had to settle for second, grossing $1.62 million.

KING OF THE HILL creators Greg Daniels and Mike Judge have teamed to develop a live-action series based off of the series' TV preacher Monsignor Martinez. Jim Dauterive, a supervising producer on KING, is set to produce the new show. Martinez is a recurring character on a TV soap that Peggy Hill and the rest of her family watch religiously. The spinoff would chronicle the vigilante adventures of the rough and tough priest. Insiders say that Fox TV is close to placing a script order for the series.

In a report commissioned by Nickelodeon U.K., BBC's plan to form two new children's networks could cause commercially funded networks up to £400 million (US$580 million) in funding over a five-year period by undermining the economics of the commercially funded stations. Therefore the other 14 children's networks in the U.K. would have to rely more on cheap imports and repeat programming to stay viable against the publicly funded BBC networks. The report was conducted by independent analysts at Arthur Andersen. Nick U.K.

Soviet animator Vyacheslav Kotenochkin, creator of the world-famous slapstick cartoon NU, POGODI, died on November 20, 2000 after a battle with a long illness. He was 74-years-old. NU, POGODI, which screened in theaters around the globe, chronicled the misadventures of a hungry, dimwitted wolf that constantly chased a wide-eye rabbit. The Roadrunner-esque cartoons always ended with the wolf shouting, "Nu, pogodi!

TOPIX/Mad Dog completed the 3D animation for a pair of 10-second spots for Boots Lights Cigarettes entitled "Striptease" and "Mirilla." In "Striptease," a crowd of lighters eagerly await the arrival of the main attraction - the new Boots Lights cigarette packaging. The old package shimmies out of its wrapper and the crowd goes wild when the new packaging makes its debut. In "Mirilla," cigarettes get restless in their old package and wrestle to be the first to get into their new packaging.

The Holland Animation Film Festival concluded its five-day festival with the presentation of its awards. This year's event was the first to hand out an award for independent animation films. With this competition, the festival sets out to promote the short, artistic animation film, and, as a result, encourage media attention toward independent animation. This year's student jury included: Joan Ashworth (animation filmmaker, England), Henk Beumers (animation filmmaker, the Netherlands) and Menno de Nooijer (animation filmmaker, the Netherlands).

BOXX Technologies, a leading provider of digital content creation tools for the entertainment and digital film industries, announced that James H. Moore has joined the company as chairman. Moore recently served as president and COO at Crossroads Systems, a high-technology manufacturer of fibre channel storage routers for the computer networking industry. Prior to joining Crossroads Systems, Moore was vice president and general manager of Crystal Semiconductor and Cirrus Logic.