Blockbuster Summer: Biggest Summer

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Complicated exposition falls away with costumes, special effects, good-looking actors and a protagonist who can shoot a white, gooey liquid 100 feet into the air from his wrists. When the genre is the star, the script doesn't have to be.

RULE 5: Get Kirsten Dunst Wet

Not every movie can have a scene in which Dunst's pink shirt gets soaked in the rain before she makes out with a guy in spandex headgear, but many will try to work it into the plot somehow.

The final lesson is that tracking opening weekends has become a national pastime. Regular people don't track what Windows 2000 pulled in on its first day of sales or how many Toyota Camrys were driven off the lot that first week. But movies, as our proudest and most exciting cultural export, are monitored by Americans the way they used to watch the NASDAQ. There's a kind of pride that we can blow $115 million in one weekend on a comic-book movie; Spider-Man was our May Day. And if $115 million of fun was going on in one weekend, people want to be at the party.

Nowadays if you see an event movie after the first couple of weeks, you're not really a participant but an observer, a sociologist trying to discover what it was that everyone was so excited about. If you want to be part of the cultural conversation--and we live in a society in which you are more likely to be embarrassed for not knowing who Kirsten Dunst is than for not being able to name your Senators--you can't wait around until there are no more lines at the multiplex.

Tom Borys, the president of AC Nielsen EDI, predicts a $9 billion year for movies, up more than 10% from last year's record. As always, summer, teeming with bored teens willing to see films more than once, is blockbuster season, and this summer is almost certain to be the biggest one ever, thanks in large part to Spider-Man and Star Wars, which opens this week. At evenly spaced intervals throughout the summer, we'll line up for a handful of blockbusters. And unless you live in a city, they are pretty much the only ones you'll be able to see until the leaves turn in the fall. This week, instead of Star Wars bouncing Spider-Man from theaters, the mall eightplex is likely to give you five Star Wars and three Spider-Mans. Artisan Entertainment CEO Amir Malin is concerned. "Some good word-of-mouth films may be squeezed out by some of these blockbuster films. It could be a very good film, but it may not have the dry powder available to open up with a huge performance."

Nor should it. Why should you pay $10 to have a meditative, contemplative experience with strangers when you have a DVD player with surround sound at home? Films are held at coliseums like the new giant theaters with stadium seating built for laughing, crying and screaming at grand heroics. Sophocles wrote about killing your kids and having sex with your mom and gods descending at the last second to save the day. He knew how to pull off a decent opening weekend. --Reported by Jess Cagle/Los Angeles and Benjamin Nugent and Heather Won Tesoriero/New York