Hugh Jackman and Matthew McConaughey in Mutant Stand-Off at Multiplex

Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your guide to everything new, noteworthy and heroically beclawed at the the movies. This week: Hugh Jackman and Matthew McConaughey duel at the the multiplex, some all-star animation goes awry, and Jim Jarmusch sits the whole thing out in Spain.

WHAT'S NEW: The summer movie season started earlier than ever this year, with X-Men Origins: Wolverine released on bootleg DVD almost a month ago. A more official commencement occurs today, with the fourth X-stallment hitting 4,000 screens nationally. The discussion about whether or not Wolverine LeakGate will impact the film's box office seems mostly overblown -- far secondary, in fact, to the question of who's the audience for an X-Men movie that's missing all but one of the characters who have pushed the franchise to $600 million in combined grosses. Fans will go, bootleg or not, but Jackman still can't open among the laycrowd Fox wants. Iron Man it ain't; expect Wolvie to smack the $84.7 million ceiling by Sunday night.

Meanwhile, Warners smartly dropped its own questionable leading man, Matthew McConaughey, into a counterprogamming slot where he'll probably fare well. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past spins Dickens into date movie, offers the box-office friendly Jennifer Garner, and should experience a lot of the same bounce that a film like What Happens in Vegas enjoyed in roughly this same frame last year. Look for a $21.2 million opening and some surprising steadiness in weeks ahead.

Also opening: Michael Keaton's directorial debut drama The Merry Gentleman; the Aussie surf-family melodrama Newcastle; the Disney music doc The Boys: The Sherman Brothers Story; the porn-industry doc Naked Ambition; and The Skeptic, featuring Tom Arnold as a "tormented man [who] reluctantly searches for greater meaning in his life." Way to stretch, Tommy.

THE BIG LOSER: With less-than-stunning 3D animation and a voice cast (Evan Rachel Wood, Justin Long, Luke Wilson, David Cross) seemingly pulled at random from the pages of OK! Magazine, the long-delayed Battle for Terra could very well be this year's Delgo. Featuring homeless Earth refugees plotting to overtake a planet of peaceful aliens, Terra offers sci-fi action in the service of a Big Message -- which Lionsgate then forgot to market. Don't expect a Delgo-like $200 per screen, but if this breaks $2.5 million on 1,150 screens, the studio should take the excess money, go straight to Vegas and see just how far its luck will go.

THE UNDERDOG: With The Limits of Control, Jim Jarmusch is back with an international cast, a genius lensman in Chris Doyle, and some lovely Spanish texture. That said, the rest stumps me as much as anybody. See Thursday's review, and look for the highest per-screen-average in the nation, probably around $14,300.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include the critics' doormat Bride Wars; the Mark Ruffalo/Ethan Hawke crime potboiler What Doesn't Kill You; the Valerie Plame scandal adaptation Nothing But the Truth; Jean-Claude Van Damme's semi-comeback JCVD; the Korean-thriller remake The Uninvited; and a whole generation's least favorite sequel, S. Darko: A Donnie Darko Tale.