Star Trek Sets Box-Office Phasers to 'Stun'

Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your guide to everything new, noteworthy and/or lost in space at the movies. This week, Paramount backs up Brinks trucks to multiplexes worldwide, a delivery service fails to deliver, and a ferocious Tilda Swinton kicks back a drink or 12. It's all after the jump.

WHAT'S NEW: News has been trickling out for a while now that J.J. Abrams directed a Star Trek reboot. You might have heard about it? Maybe on this site? Right -- that one. You know you'll see Trek, just like a few million others who couldn't care less about the franchise that preceded it and at whose altar a nation of fanboys worships daily. You know you'll brave the crowds, you'll sit through the applause, you'll endure the literal black holes in the plot, and you'll walk out and forget about it within hours. Why bother? Because phenomena are fun, and you know you won't regret it.

That's what Paramount is selling this weekend -- not J.J. Abrams and a cast of semi-knowns playing dress up on the Enterprise. It worked last year for Iron Man and even Benjamin Button to some degree, yet without those films' A-list juice (and with some residual competition from X-Men Origins: Wolverine), Trek will top off around $91.5 million.

Virtually everything else daring to open today is doing so in limited release from the relative comfort of the art house. Chief among them might be Rudo y Cursi, which reteams Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna as a pair of soccer-star siblings whose excesses outmatch their talents (see Seth's review here); depending on how (or if) the word-of-mouth spans cultures in the urban centers where Rudo will be on 75 screens, you might see a sleeper averaging around $6,500 per theater. Kirby Dick's scathing closeted-Republican doc Outrage will easily beat that average on only five screens, topping off near $13,300. Scott Speedman is terrific in Adoration, which, along with Robert Pattinson and Javier Beltrán's gay-artist bio-romp Little Ashes, round out the busy indie weekend.

Also opening: If you're interested in this kind of thing, catch Jessica Biel's first-ever nude scenes before the Crash-ish Powder Blue vanishes to DVD; let Objectified teach you everything you ever wanted to know about the relationships between people and manufactured objects; and give a prize to the millionth dance-competition romance, Love N' Dancing.

OSCAR QUALIFYING ALERT: The Sundance competition documentary Prom Night in Mississippi seems to be planning an Oscar bid, opening quietly at theaters in Encino and Washington Heights for its one-week qualifying run. The film is about Charleston High School's first integrated prom (paid for by Morgan Freeman, no less) in 2008; it has not yet been acquired for distribution beyond this week, so see it while you can and maybe help make the producers' four-walling worth their trouble.

THE BIG LOSER: While the Enterprise crew may explore strange new worlds, only the team behind Next Day Air is boldly going where no movie has gone before: Star Trek counterprogramming. Good luck with that; on 1,100 screens and not much backing from Summit Entertainment, the drug-delivery comedy should barely reach $4.5 million.

THE UNDERDOG: I'm not sure what else to tell you about Julia, which its star Tilda Swinton spoke about at length here last week. It's not an easy sit, and Swinton's vicious drunk and rookie criminal is not a woman I'd generally recommend spending time with. But for craft, character and a few panicky shocks along the way, the actress's warp-speed has a fantastic appeal of its own.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include a bang-up Criterion edition The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; the meet-cute Dustin Hoffman/Emma Thompson dramedy Last Chance Harvey; the acclaimed Michelle Williams indie Wendy and Lucy, and at long last, Jake and the Fatman: The Second Season.