By Lucas Shaw and Tony Maglio LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - "Fast & Furious 6" has passed the $500 million mark at the worldwide box office, Universal Pictures announced Thursday. The film has reached that number faster than any other movie in the studio's history. Justin Lin's fourth film in the franchise has made $180.3 million domestically and another $342.2 million overseas. It opened in the top spot in all 60 territories it has opened in, and been the top movie in the world two weeks in a row. Universal has already greenlit another film, slated for next summer.

By Todd Cunningham LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - "The Purge," a horror thriller that cost $3 million to make, looks like it will knock off the far pricier "Fast and Furious 6" and Owen Wilson-Vince Vaughn workplace comedy "The Internship" at the box office this weekend. Universal would be OK with its blockbuster cars-and-criminals sequel giving up the top spot in its third week, because the "The Purge" is the first movie to come out of the studio's deal with low-budget horror guru Jason Blum, the man behind the lucrative "Paranormal Activity" franchise. ...

NEW YORK (AP) — Google says in a new study all the online searching and trailer-watching moviegoers do ahead of a film's release can have significant predictive powers at the box office.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — As a teenager, Esther Williams dreamed of Olympic glory on the U.S. swim team.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Comic book teenagers Archie, Veronica, Betty and Jughead are coming to the big screen for the first time in a new live-action feature film based on the long-running "Archie" comic series, its publisher said on Thursday. The comedy will be produced by Warner Bros. Pictures and will feature the lead "Archie" characters in a high school in present-day Riverdale, the fictional backdrop of the series, Archie Comics said in a statement on its website. ...

By Jeff Sneider LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Javier Bardem has signed on to star in J.C. Chandor's next movie "A Most Violent Year" and is in talks to join Sean Penn in "The Gunman," TheWrap has learned. Studiocanal is fully financing "The Gunman," which will be produced by Joel Silver and Andrew Rona of Silver Pictures. Pierre Morel is directing the action movie, which has Cannes starlet Jasmine Trinca ("Miele") circling the female lead. ...

By Leah Rozen LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - "The Purge" is a standard issue home-invasion movie drizzled with a thin glaze of sensationalism thanks to a provocative setup. The movie's front cover may be enticing, but the contents prove all too familiar. The horror thriller is set in the near future, in 2022, when a group collectively referred to as the "New Founding Fathers" now guides the country. These leaders have decreed that, one night a year, citizens can roam the streets to perpetrate mayhem and murder in a collective spasm of rage and free-for-all vigilantism. ...

By Lucas Shaw and Brent Lang LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Brad Pitt, Robert Downey Jr., Vin Diesel and J.J. Abrams call Los Angeles home, but for the world premieres of their latest films like "Iron Man 3" and "World War Z," they all decamped for the new hub of Hollywood's biggest productions -- London. It is a testament to how the U.K. city is attracting filmmakers in droves because of lucrative tax incentives that make one of the most expensive cities in the world cheaper to shoot films in than Los Angeles. ...

By Tim Molloy NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) - Time Warner and China Media Capital, a Chinese investment fund focused on media and entertainment, have formed a strategic investment partnership aimed at meeting the country's demand for content across multiple platforms. The alliance unites the home of Warner Bros., HBO, and Turner Broadcasting with one of China's major investors. "China's media and entertainment industry is undergoing a profound change on various fronts including technology, creativity and commercialization," Ruigang Li, Chairman of CMC, said in a statement. ...

By Jeff Sneider LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Once he wraps the villainous role of the Rhino in "The Amazing Spider-Man 2," Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti will play Brian Wilson's therapist Dr. Eugene Landy in Bill Pohlad's indie movie "Love & Mercy." John Cusack and Paul Dano are set to star as the troubled Beach Boys frontman during different points in his remarkable life. ...

NEW YORK (AP) — Archie's old Riverdale gang is headed to the big screen.

By Shilpa Jamkhandikar MUMBAI (Reuters) - After dominating Indian cinema for more than four decades, Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan is gearing up for his television acting debut this year. Bachchan is no stranger to television, having hosted several seasons of the Indian version of the quiz show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" but this will be his first role in a TV fiction series. It comes after Bachchan made his Hollywood debut last month in Australian director Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby", walking the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival with Leonardo DiCaprio. ...

By Eric Kelsey LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Esther Williams, whose experiences as a young swimming champion led to a career of Hollywood "aqua-musicals" designed just for her, died on Thursday in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of 91, her spokesman said. Williams, one of the biggest box-office stars of the 1940s and 1950s, died peacefully in her sleep and had been in declining health due to old age, spokesman Harlan Boll said. Williams became known as "Hollywood's Mermaid" and "The Queen of the Surf. ...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Esther Williams, the swimming champion turned actress who starred in glittering and aquatic Technicolor musicals of the 1940s and 1950s, has died. She was 91.

By Zorianna Kit LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - After numerous starts and stops by Hollywood executives to project Judy Blume books onto the big screen, the best-selling author and her filmmaker son decided to make it happen. The film adaptation of her 1981 young adult book "Tiger Eyes" opens in theaters on Friday and simultaneously on iTunes, DirecTV and On-Demand. It was a family project, with Blume and her son, Lawrence Blume, writing the screenplay and producing the film. ...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Until he died in 2009, Michael Jackson was fiercely protective of his children (save for that one balcony-dangling incident). He covered their faces when they went out with him so they might enjoy the kind of normal childhood he missed out on as a member of the Jackson 5.

NEW DELHI (AP) — Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan says he'll make his television acting debut in a new series this year.

(Reuters) - British actor Stephen Fry attempted suicide last year, he said during a podcast interview on Wednesday in which he talked openly about his ongoing battle with mental illness. Fry, 55, told comedian Richard Herring in the interview in front of a live audience that he was "a victim of my own moods" and that he was required to take medication "so that I don't get either too hyper or too depressed to the point of suicide." "I'd go as far as to tell you I attempted it last year. ...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Several weeks after overseeing the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed the name of the raid commander in a speech attended by the writer of the film "Zero Dark Thirty," according to a draft report by Pentagon investigators.

By Brent Lang LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Ben Affleck will follow up his Oscar-winning "Argo" work by stretching his villainous muscles as an offshore gambling kingpin in "Runner, Runner." The high-stakes drama marks a departure for Affleck, who usually gets to wear the white hat even when engaging in criminality in films like "The Town." It pits him against Justin Timberlake, who at 32 looks a bit long-in-the-tooth to be playing a Princeton whiz kid who loses his tuition money playing online poker. ...