Will the Wild Rumpus End Before it Even Begins?

Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your regular guide to everything new, noteworthy and/or overly noxious at the movies. This week, Gerard Butler gets even-ish, Penn Badgley drags a minor cult classic to hell, and the Wild Things are finally in the house. But are they welcome? More burning questions and answers after the jump.

WHAT'S NEW: The consensus around Movieline HQ is that Law Abiding Citizen is an over-bloody, latently GOP wet dream with little nutritional value. Which sounds good enough for it to surprise people this weekend -- not as some No. 1 Outta Nowhere or anything (I sincerely think Couples Retreat has the legs to defend last week's crown), but early estimates under $10 million seem quite low for anything this saturated that also features Gerard Butler muttering crap like, "It's gonna be biblical!" Overture knows what it's doing with this one, and if it weren't for Paranormal Activity and The Stepfather pulling away a few million dollars here and there, this could probably sneak into the top three. As it is, Citizen will happily take fourth place with around $15.3 million.

Speaking of The Stepfather, what the hell is this? A PG-13 remake of the 1987 Terry O'Quinn thriller that had everyone in my junior high school talking for about 15 minutes before that radical Michael J. Fox/Joan Jett rock drama Light of Day came along to distract us for another 15 minutes until Mannequin opened? Cut it out, Screen Gems! America wants more Crazy White Bitch movies like your huge hit Obsessed; it does not want Penn Badgley's 19th take of trying to look scared before the director finally says "Screw it" and goes off to sniffle into a tall drink somewhere. Or... maybe it does in moderation; $10.5 million isn't the worst that could happen. But still. The Stepfather?! Why not just exhume My Demon Lover and cover all the low-rent genre angles?

Also opening: The middling, Gotham-centric short-film collection New York, I Love You, featuring the first and likely the last coexistence of Brett Ratner, Fatih Akin and Shekhar Kapur on a single project; the American/Greek culture clash Opa!; the Ice Cube/Mike Epps comedy Janky Promoters; the Sundance darling from Chile The Maid (NYC only); and, as a last resort for the entire family, Tinkerbell and the Lost Treasure (L.A. only).

THE BIG LOSER: The conventional wisdom has Where the Wild Things Are tracking for first place, probably around $30 million. Both the estimate and the estimators are high. I foresee Spike Jonze's $90 million passion project crashing into the side of a mountain with around $12 million and fifth place overall, never to be heard from again after two or three weeks of frantic searching -- kind of like what happened with another overpriced Warner Bros. pseudo-kids flick, Speed Racer, a year and a half ago. As with the Wachowskis' bomb, I'm not convinced this brand is actually influential enough to bring generations' worth of moviegoers to the theater, or that parents will blindly take their kids just because it's rated PG, or that the Wild Things look sort of cuddly, so what the hell, let's go. If anyone will save this movie it'll be hipsters, but even they're too cool to acknowledge this is anything close to a must-see. I just don't get it. And before you tell me I'm not the target audience, be prepared to tell me who is. Sincerest hats off to Jonze for following and executing his vision; here's hoping he packs plenty of water and Clif Bars for his extended journey into the Hollywood wilderness.

THE UNDERDOG: I'll have more on Black Dynamite later today, but Scott Sanders and Michael Jai White's blaxploitation parody/homage has stuck with me since finally seeing it last week -- this, after months and months of build-up following its hugely well-received Sundance premiere. I worry its audience might have thinned out a bit with festival play in bigger markets where it opens this weekend, but word-of-mouth is way up across ethnic and gender lines. I think it can break $1 million on 70 screens, but even three-quarters of that would be a pretty good weekend ahead of a wider trickle-out in the coming weeks.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD releases this week include the obligatory unrated cut of Sam Raimi's sterling (if economically underachieving) Drag Me to Hell, the obligatory deluxe edition of Sandra Bullock's summer surprise The Proposal, Atom Egoyan's troubling drama Adoration, the tragically underseen indie American Violet, and the Criterion edition of Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding.