Weekend Forecast: Fockers of the World Unite and Take Over

Welcome back to a very special holiday edition of Movieline's Weekend Forecast! Actually there is nothing that special about it besides the fact that it's on Thursday and features perhaps the most whiplash-inducing swing of good-to-bad multiplex fare of any week in recent memory. But therein lies the happy news: There is good stuff to see here! But how much money will it make? To the Forecast!

NATIONAL OUTLOOK

· Little Fockers: Maybe I shouldn't admit this, but I've never seen a Fockers film -- not 2000's Meet the Parents, nor 2004's Meet the Fockers. But Michelle Orange's review makes fairly explicit everything I've heard and/or have intuited over the years -- the first is a good, solid studio comedy, the second stretches it to semi-regrettable franchise length, and then... this. The point is if even the minority of Fockers-free viewers in the world can sense the lump of coal Universal's prepping for moviegoers this weekend, what must the initiated multitudes think as they tremulously extend their stockings and await the heavy thud of Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro's renewed screen rivalry? On second thought, upon looking at the tracking and making calculations from the safety of Movieline HQ, don't answer that. FORECAST: $37.2 million Fri-Sat; $51 million five-day

· True Grit: Hell, yes, now we're talking. The Coens' latest reboots the 1967 Charles Portis novel for a new generation -- which is to say, for actual thinking adults who want to remember the holiday weekend for more than a dreadful Thursday Night Football game, gustatory overindulgence and the equivalent of getting spit on by the Hollywood franchise devil. Jeff Bridges plays Rooster Cogburn, the debauched one-eyed marshal recruited by young Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld in the year's most accomplished debut by far) to track down the man who killed her father. Matt Damon joins them as a Texas marshal with a manhunt imperative of his own. The tone is just about consistent with Portis's dry, streakingly parodic source material that would have the Western hung by its own hoary rope; the metaphor is not lost on the Coens or their collaborators, literally or figuratively, and their work brings a welcome touch of class, intelligence and counterprogramming to theaters. Audiences will thank them for it. FORECAST: $20.4 million Fri-Sat; $26.1 million five-day

· Gulliver's Travels: Or maybe Charles Portis isn't your thing? More of a Jonathan Swift person? What if we give you Swift's most famous novel, updated with Jack Black among the little people of Lilliput and the whole thing rendered in murky 3-D? Merry Christmas! (?) FORECAST: $13.5 million Sat-Sun

REGIONAL OUTLOOK

It's not every week you get to go check out a perfect 10, but to hear Stephanie Zacharek tell it, that's what we've got in Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, which spins the languorous tale of actor Johhny Marco (Stephen Dorff) and his young daughter (Elle Fanning) from the environs of the Chateau Marmont to Europe and beyond. That's on seven screens for starters. The King's Speech also branches out to its most aggressive market position yet on 700 screens, while Black Swan adds a few hundred more on its way out of the best specialty box office run of the year. Gwyneth Paltrow's Country Strong opens on a couple screens here or there, with more to come in the weeks ahead; we'll revisit as details avail themselves. Also expanding by the dozen to major-ish markets: Rabbit Hole and Casino Jack. And that's your holiday! Enjoy it!