Attractions: The $100 Million Toy?

Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your regular guide to everything new, noteworthy and/or blindingly nostalgic (again) at the movies. This week, Pixar puts down some playthings, Warners cuts its losses, and the overall summer doldrums aren't especially improving. Now that I've got you so massively engrossed, read on to see what you'll be skipping as a whole this week -- and what kind of money it might make in your absence.

WHAT'S NEW: I was talking to someone earlier this week who shared my skepticism about how Toy Story 3 might actually open. The problem was that there's nothing to really evoke finality, or even some sense of separation from the previous franchise installments; an ad for TS3 could just as well be an ad from TS1. In less than a week, that lukewarm awareness appears to have surged into some white-hot appreciation. It looks like everyone and their mother (literally) is going to see this, and it's in 3-D, and it's the best movie of the year (or something), and there's no way it can do any less than $100 million. In cases like this I tend to stand out of the way and let the torrent of conventional wisdom run free, not least because nearly two months into the summer movie season, we need another real blockbuster. So: $102.5 million and total world domination until Eclipse barges down the aisle 12 days from now.

Also opening in limited release in NYC and L.A.: The Duplass brothers' underwhelming mainstream bow Cyrus; the luminous Tilda Swinton vehicle I Am Love; the documentary Stonewall Uprising; and the hipster-on-a-cruise indie Wah Do Dem. In NYC only, The Killer Inside Me rears its ugly head alongside the more palatable ZIP code doc 45365 and Agnès Jaoui's gabby latest Let It Rain. In L.A., look for an expansion of the education doc The Lottery and the Chekov adaptation The Duel.

THE BIG LOSER: I really wanted Jonah Hex to be good, if only because we need more Josh Brolin -- and even Megan Fox, if we're honest (are Carey Mulligan or Keira Knightley or insert-nubile-young-starlet-name-here ever going to provide nearly the offcamera entertainment value?) -- in the world, not less. This film's projected $11 million opening will not optimize those probabilities.

THE UNDERDOG: It's true: 8: The Mormon Proposition does lose its pace as it trots along its lean 80-minute narrative course. Where it could have been a heartbreaking and infuriating manifesto against a sincerely effed-up Mormon Church's crusade against the gays -- the political equivalent to Kurt Kuenne's unforgettable 2008 family doc Dear Zachary -- blinks on its way to revealing a more systemic and, frankly, irresolvable tradition of fear and loathing. But when director Reed Cowan is angry, and when he does stride inexorably down the warpath with his documentation and searing interviews, 8 is pretty potent stuff about an organization that must be not only reckoned with, but stopped. And at least that's something.