The Screengrab

Studio executives, like TV weathermen, can be wrong half the time and still make a pretty fine living. One major difference, of course, is “The Suits” in Hollywood spend zillions on publicity and advertising campaigns to attempt to make their forecasts come true...and even then, they’re only right about half the time when it comes to cinematic hits and misses.

We here at the Screengrab will take that action. With the 2008 Blockbuster Season bearing down on us LIKE A RADIOACTIVE SPACE BUS THAT TRANSFORMS INTO A GIANT ROBOT LOADED WITH EXPLOSIVES, we hereby offer our predictions for the summer’s Top 5 Hits and Misses, in hopes of scoring ourselves sweet development deals based on our uncanny pop culture pulse-fingering prognostication abilities.

For the purposes of this experiment, “HIT” and “MISS” will refer not to the critical reception or cinematic quality of the films in question (because, really, who cares about that stuff?). Instead, we’ll calculate the accuracy of our predictions based on each film’s domestic box office gross in relation to its marketing/production budget and the hype/expectation surrounding it.

Want to play along at home? Let us know your Top 5 picks for upcoming Summer Hits, and compare them to our collective and individual predictions. Whoever scores the most correct answers WINS A BRAND NEW IMAGINARY CAR!

And now, our picks for the Top 5 HITS of Summer 2008:

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Chicago was the official stand-in for Gotham City in Batman Begins; this time around, in The Dark Knight, it'll be Liverpool, England, birthplace of the Beatles.  Much of the primary filming of the new Batman sequel was done in the northwestern industrial city, and it features a number of noteworthy landmarks from the area, including the waterfront, the Swansea power station, and London's Piccadilly Circus.  According to an article in Liverpool's Echo newspaper, municipal leaders are hoping that the presumed success of the movie will help Liverpool become a tourist draw and boost foreign visitors to the Culture City.

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Much like their source of inspiration, most superhero movies are not good. About twenty cape-and-tights franchises have made the jump to the big screen in the past decade, and maybe four of them could actually be called "good movies." Chris Nolan might have been the first director to (almost) make a great superhero movie with Batman Begins. But seriously, watch this leaked trailer for follow up The Dark Knight. Call it hyperbole, but from this tiny glimpse, it might just do for superhero movies what The Dark Knight Returns did for superhero comics back in the mid-'80s. Also, when did Heath Ledger get awesome? I saw A Knight’s Tale. That was not awesome. — John Constantine

The productions of perhaps the two most anticipated comic book adaptations of all time — Watchmen and The Dark Knight — have both kicked into high gear, and there’s plenty of geeky content to go around before the movies actually end up in the can.  (Try not to think too hard about the fact that Dark Knight draws only its title, and nothing else, from Frank Miller’s stunning Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, or that Watchmen is being directed by a guy who turned another, far lesser Frank Miller book into a homoerotic big-screen video game.) In the Guardian, film blogger Sean Dodson provides a handy rundown of the astonishingly large number of Dark Knight teaser websites that have sprung up in the last few weeks (including ones for the Gotham Police Department, the local newspaper and a creepily amusing recruitment site for the Joker’s henchmen). Meanwhile, Zack Snyder himself provides some photos from the back lot of Watchmen, which contain lots of goodies for longtime fans of the comic (lots of characters, locations, companies, and other cultural references to the book are present in the background of the shots), although the set designer doesn’t seem to realize that Grain Belt beer has never been a big seller in New York.
— Leonard Pierce