Sideshow: Pacino could be tackling Paterno

Al Pacino may play Joe Paterno in a new movie about the late Penn State football coach, reports Deadline.com's Mike Fleming. The film, says Fleming, would be based on Joe Posnanski's biography of Paterno, which detailed the last two years of the coach's life.

No writer or director is attached to the movie, but Pacino's involvement would continue the Oscar-winner's string of controversial real-life characters.

Pacino has played Dr. Jack Kevorkian (in the HBO movie You Don't Know Jack) and Roy Cohn (in the HBO adaptation of Angels in America). He's also played a football coach before, leading the Oliver Stone drama Any Given Sunday.

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Johnny Depp acknowledges his latest obsession is tattoos, and the star has recently gotten a few with a man he helped release from Arkansas' death row. Depp and Damien Echols were in Toronto for the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of West of Memphis, a documentary about the criminal case that put Echols on death row.

Echols said that when he gets together with the actor, they look for a tattoo parlor. And Depp said their dual designs are all about "celebrating the moment."

Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin spent 18 years in prison for the 1993 murders of three boys. All three were freed after pleading guilty to the crimes, although they still maintain their innocence.

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The Possession occupied the top spot at the weekend's nearly comatose box office, the worst in more than a decade.

The fright flick with Kyra Sedgwick and Jeffrey Dean Morgan playing the parents of a girl possessed by a demon earned $9.5 million in its second outing, the lowest-grossing weekend for the box office this year and one of the worst in a decade. It marked the first time since 2008 that no film managed to crack the $10 million mark.

The weekend after Labor Day is typically the slowest of the year, but this weekend's grosses were down 20 percent over last year, when Contagion opened in first place with $22.4 million.

Total box office revenue is estimated at $67 million, which would make this the worst weekend since the one after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when revenue was $59.7 million.

"There just wasn't a strong opener," said Paul Dergarabedian, box office analyst for Hollywood.com. "We came off a summer that ended with a whimper. There wasn't any momentum. It just comes down to the movies and the marketplace.

"There wasn't some extraneous force keeping people out of the theaters - this crop of movies just didn't have that solid draw."

The bootlegging tale Lawless starring Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, and Jessica Chastain kept a lock on the No. 2 position in its second weekend with $6 million, bringing its total haul to $23.5 million, while The Words, featuring Bradley Cooper as an aspiring, plagiarizing writer and Zoe Saldana as his wife debuted in third place with $5 million.