Weekend Forecast: Lions and Fighters and Tourists, Oh My

Welcome to the latest edition of Weekend Forecast, where new releases, junk science and arbitrary instinct collide every week to spark a mushroom cloud of box-office speculation. Today, a family franchise takes on the A-list, an Oscar contender comes out swinging, and the art house goes a little crazy.

NATIONAL OUTLOOK

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: After getting summarily thrown off the Disney lot for underperforming (has another major franchise sequel ever grossed less than half its predecessor while still cracking $100 million?), Walden Media packed up its Narnia series for the fertile climes of Fox. Two years later, we have Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a story and subject about which I don't pretend to know the first thing but whose visual flair attracted Michelle Orange's endorsement earlier this week. Bottom line, however, is its relatively low brand loyalty and precarious placement in the long shadows of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Tangled, both of which should siphon off a not-inconsiderable percentage of Narnia's intended audience. Fox is coming hard at the marketing for a crucial first weekend and, eventually, legs of their own. A $40 million debut would go a long way toward that, but I'm not sure this lion has that much roar. FORECAST: $37.7 million

The Tourist: Sony lost the plot for this one somewhere between Venice and Hollywood: A romantic espionage thriller featuring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in his first film after his Oscar-winning The Lives of Others. What could go wrong? Not a whole lot, according to Stephanie Zacharek, but the rest of the critical establishment has unsheathed its blades for a filleting; we'll be eating prime cut for weeks. The studio got the message early, setting The Tourist up as a by-the-numbers star vehicle (not unlike Focus did for George Clooney's The American); it should likely perform decently on that basis despite the interference of holiday obligations and/or hangovers and the like. FORECAST: $19.4 million.

REGIONAL OUTLOOK

The Fighter takes its Oscar quest public this weekend in limited release; a few awards-season onlookers have observed that the Mark Wahlberg/Christian Bale boxing-and-crack family drama has some of the same audience-pleasing constitution as King's Speech before it, and that if audiences actually want a boxing-and-crack family drama, it could come up among Academy voters to split the difference between Speech and Social Network. That's a conversation left to the Oscar Index, but the opening weekend potential is all Forecast, so let's say minimum $65K per screen to stay in the Best Picture conversation, and minimum $55K to keep Wahlberg, Melissa Leo and Amy Adams in contention in the acting categories. (As we know, Bale has Supporting all but won.)

Elsewhere, the Weinsteins are officially Oscar-qualifying John Wells's recession drama The Company Men in New York and Los Angeles; it's set to open wider next month. It's a cosmetic release today at best, but you could see far worse, more condescending films about These Effed Times of Ours (cough, cough, Up in the Air): Men features Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper in various states of pink-slipped estrangement from their professional lives and the lifestyles they afforded. Periodically on-the-nose and given to a few cloying third-act hijinks likelier to inspire cringing than action among the unemployed, it remains a sly, sturdy updating of America's working-class cinema of the late-'70s/early-'80s. Just because the Weinsteins gave it short shrift doesn't mean we have to.

Also opening in limited release: Halle Berry's cray-cray Oscar-clip-a-thon Frankie and Alice and the dreadful Papasploitation biopic Hemingway's Garden of Eden. At least that Patriots-Bears game looks good on Sunday. Who's in?