USA DAWN: NEWS AND UPDATES

Jimmy Fallon played a Disney Edition of “Box of Microphones” with Josh Gad on Tuesday’s  The Tonight Show.  They took turns singing random tunes while the microphones did strange and wonderful things with their voices. It ended, of course, with a duet singing of the title tune from  Beauty and the Beast . Gad is among the actors making the late-night TV rounds this week in promotion of Disney’s live-action remake of its hit animated movie, opening this week.

Disney will discontinue the Club Penguin subscription social game for desktop and mobile devices, and at the same will launch a new mobile game featuring the cartoon aquatic birds in March. The Mouse House acquired Club Penguin in 2007 for in a deal reportedly worth up to $700 million. At one point, Club Penguin had registered more than 200 million accounts on the freemium service aimed at young kids. Club Penguin announced the change in a blog post Monday. The current game will cease on March 29, 2017, and memberships for desktop Club Penguin and the Club Penguin app will no longer be available for purchase as of Jan. 31, at which time paid member accounts will no longer be charged for the service. Even with the demise of the existing 11-year-old service, Club Penguin promised “an amazing new product, Club Penguin Island” — set to launch in March — that “offers a uniquely penguin experience, with new features and gameplay, making it more ...

Kicking off the Thanksgiving holiday break with gusto, Disney’s animated adventure “Moana” opened with plenty of box office power and took in $2.6 million at Tuesday night preview showings starting at 7 p.m. in North America. The “Moana” gross doubled the $1.3 million Tuesday preview record set last year by Disney’s “The Good Dinosaur.” It’s also far above the $1.2 million preview gross from “Frozen,” the $1.4 million Thursday preview total for “Big Hero 6” and the $1.7 million Thursday preview for “Zootopia” in March. “Moana” is expected to easily top the holdover numbers for “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” during the five-day Thanksgiving holiday along with the openings for Brad Pitt’s thriller “Allied,” Billy Bob Thornton’s raucous comedy “Bad Santa 2” and Warren Beatty’s Howard Hughes comedy-drama “Rules Don’t Apply.” “Moana,” centered on the journey of a Polynesian teenage girl, is expected to dominate moviegoing with about $75 million at 3,875 locations d...