Cinema: Aieee! It's Summer!!

The racking sobs rise in a plangent chorus outside the nation's multiplexes, as young girls cry, "How can we survive a summer without Leo?" In the past the season has survived pretty well without Leonardo DiCaprio. But in the wake of Titanic, studios wish they could clone the blond bambino as easily and guiltlessly as they steal story ideas. What works at the movies? What else? What worked before!

So, opening just before Memorial Day, exactly a year after The Lost World: Jurassic Park, is another really big lizard movie, Godzilla. This updating of the old Japanese monster series, by the Independence Day team, has been teased so cannily ("Size Does Matter") that now industry folk have only one debate: Which film will come in second? Analyst Alan Kassan of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell picks Saving Private Ryan. "A great script, Steven Spielberg directing, Tom Hanks starring--I'd take points in that."

Studios plan their summer slates a year in advance: one humongous action film leavened with some kid-targeted comedies and an adult thriller or two. Then, of course, everything goes wrong. "The most interesting thing this summer," says Harry Knowles Jr., the dweebmaster of the movie-gossip website Ain't It Cool News, "is that we don't have Warner's Superman film or Disney's Mighty Joe Young or Universal's Hulk coming out, as they were originally slated to. We've had three big dropouts."

So studios sensibly scale down. Troubled Universal's modest non-Hulk slate now includes the biotech scare show Virus, the George Clooney caper Out of Sight and Terry Gilliam's dopester saga Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with Johnny Depp--not just an anti-summer summer movie but an anti-Hollywood Hollywood movie.

You still have to sell the film. Godzilla went with size, plastering hints about its star's dimensions on 8,000 outdoor displays. Others try niche marketing. In ads on Ally McBeal, Armageddon peddles itself as a love story, with kissy spots featuring Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler. The idea is to attract Hollywood's hot new demographic, young females--the segment PaineWebber analyst Christopher Dixon calls "the new bobby-soxers."

And finally you go for as much ancillary business as seems apt. There will be hundreds of Godzilla spin-offs. But for Private Ryan, DreamWorks canceled a G.I. Joe action figure modeled on Hanks. Maybe the muscles were too big.

Below is our tout sheet, based on watching trailers, listening to sages and making stuff up. Fact is, no one knows what works. Barry Sonnenfeld, director of last year's gigantic Men in Black, says he's in the dark. He is sure of only one thing: the blockbuster of summer '99 will be an update of '60s TV's The Wild, Wild West. Starring Will Smith. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld.

BOY TOYS!!!

GODZILLA (May 20). Japan's revenge on New York City for getting suckered into buying too much mid-'80s Manhattan real estate. The Chrysler building, MetLife, Madison Square Garden: no icon is safe from the big green guy. And he breeds! (Sequels, we bet.) In its '97 bow, Jurassic 2 took in $93 million. Godzilla could be the first $100 million weekend movie.