Weekend Forecast: Can Red Riding Hood Take a Bite Out of Battle: L.A.?

"What?" you ask. "Weekend Forecast? Is it Friday morning already?" Sorry, not quite. But why wait to have a glance at the week's new releases big and small, good and bad, cash-magnets and otherwise -- accompanied, as always, by Movieline's peerless reviews and bulletproof box-office projections? Consider this moving up our release date; read on for the lowdown.

NATIONAL OUTLOOK

· Battle: Los Angeles: One good, massive-scale alien-conflict turn deserves another at Sony, where, a year and a half ago, District 9 rocked accounts receivable with a $115 million domestic gross. (To say nothing of its Best Picture Oscar nomination.) What to do next? How about develop and make one of the most aggressively disliked films of the year to date -- a thinly veiled Marines advertisement with enough shaky-cam hijinks to have you puking in your popcorn? Great call, Sony. Even better call: Slapping enough marketing lipstick on this pig to land it a modeling agent and a Maybelline endorsement. Every 15-year-old boy in America will see this within the next three days, except for the Amish kids, I guess, who'll be buggying by mulitplexes in Lancaster, Penn., barking, "Haaaa, suckerrrrzzz..." at the clusters upon clusters of mouthbreathing contemporaries. FORECAST: $29.4 million

· Red Riding Hood: And every 15-year-old girl in America will see this, even the Amish ones: Catherine Hardwicke cashes in her Twilight token on a slick new adaptation of the famous fairytale, featuring Amanda Seyfried. I like this to overperform, in fact -- which still won't have it surpassing Battle: LA, but will definitely have a sequel in development within weeks. FORECAST: $27.4 million

· Mars Needs Moms: Poor Disney: Not even Pixar season yet and they already have another animated hopeful stomping onto Gnomeo and Juliet's sturdy sleeper-hit turf. Good problems to have! I doubt this will do Gnomeo money, though, especially not with Rango likely to hold well in the top five -- and maybe even the top three. This has 3-D and IMAX premiums on its side, however, so it'll be close. But! That said, 59 out of 100 moviegoers polled would take Johnny Depp's week two over Seth Green's week one -- and the other 41 took Johnny Depp's week one last Friday, you know? FORECAST: $16.4 million

THE PRIME DESTINATION

Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami returns to New York and Los Angeles arthouses with Certified Copy, a playful, mysterious, sweet and mildly wrenching journey through Tuscany with a writer (William Shimell) and a shop owner/tour guide (Juliette Binoche) who may or may not be quite what they seem. From the linguistic twists (as practical as they are representative of how couples in crisis adapt, according to its star) to the gloriously dynamic performance of its leading lady (which won Binoche the Best Actress prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival), the film ropes you in with its secrets and sends you home cataloging your own. Bring a date and clear your schedule -- you'll be talking it over for a while.

REGIONAL OUTLOOK

A few more limited release of note are led far and away by Jane Eyre, Cary Fukunaga's stirring adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë classic; this one expands nationally throughout March, so hang in there, all you Midwestern English-lit undergrads -- it'll soon enough be at a theater near you. Bonnie and Clyde vs. Dracula seems vaguely appealing for obvious reasons (to say nothing of its trailer), while Christopher Walken and/or Val Kilmer completists will no doubt race to the Mafia-enforcer drama Kill the Irishman. And don't forget Black Death! Talk about taking a date! Ugh.

Anyway, what's on your viewing plate? (NCAA conference playoffs is an acceptable answer, by the way.)