The Screengrab

Charlize Theron is on the publicity trail in hopes someone will notice she’s co-starring in the big Fourth of July weekend extravaganza Hancock. (She was hardly featured in the early trailers, although, perhaps in reaction to some bad buzz, she’s much more of a presence in the latest round of ads.) “When she walks into a room she reduces everyone else to hobbits - but she's better known for her acting,” Carole Cadwalladr writes in The Observer. Maybe that’s true, but it’s probably more accurate to say Theron is best known for her willingness to ugly it up if the role demands it. Not that she’s happy about that.

For instance, for her role in In the Valley of Elah, Theron grew out her natural hair color and wore a ponytail, which is a pretty far cry from the prosthetic teeth and latex skin she used to transform herself into serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Still, the press cited this as yet another example of Theron playing down her beauty.

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In Jack Mathews’ book The Battle of Brazil, which recounts Terry Gilliam’s struggle to get his director’s cut of Brazil released by Universal Pictures, the author reprints a list of alternative titles the Universal suits presented to Gilliam. Apparently they felt Brazil was confusing or misleading – after all, the movie didn’t take place in Brazil, and they certainly didn’t want to give audiences the wrong impression. And you can certainly see how these titles would have proved clearer and more appealing to the masses: If Osmosis, Who Are You?, Explanada Fortunata Is Not My Real Name, The Girl in the House on the Truck That's on Fire, and my all-time favorite, Gnu Yak, Gnu Yak and Other Bestial Places.

The point is, choosing the title of a movie can be a multi-million dollar decision, as Josh Friedman reports in the L.A. Times. It’s so important, there’s even a consulting firm called TitleDoctors, started by marketing consultants Seth Lockhart and Jamil Barrie. Imagine, this is a job you can have – meeting with movie executives and presenting them with a list of old song titles you think would be a perfect fit for their new romantic comedy or crime drama.

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And now, The Screengrab’s predictions for the Top 5 box office disappointments and/or outright disastrous flops of Summer 2008!

(Want to play along at home? Let us know your Top 5 picks for upcoming Summer Bombs, and compare them to our collective and individual predictions. Whoever scores the most correct answers WINS AN IMAGINARY FANTASY DATE WITH MIKE MYERS AND/OR SARAH JESSICA PARKER!)

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Studio executives, like TV weathermen, can be wrong half the time and still make a pretty fine living. One major difference, of course, is “The Suits” in Hollywood spend zillions on publicity and advertising campaigns to attempt to make their forecasts come true...and even then, they’re only right about half the time when it comes to cinematic hits and misses.

We here at the Screengrab will take that action. With the 2008 Blockbuster Season bearing down on us LIKE A RADIOACTIVE SPACE BUS THAT TRANSFORMS INTO A GIANT ROBOT LOADED WITH EXPLOSIVES, we hereby offer our predictions for the summer’s Top 5 Hits and Misses, in hopes of scoring ourselves sweet development deals based on our uncanny pop culture pulse-fingering prognostication abilities.

For the purposes of this experiment, “HIT” and “MISS” will refer not to the critical reception or cinematic quality of the films in question (because, really, who cares about that stuff?). Instead, we’ll calculate the accuracy of our predictions based on each film’s domestic box office gross in relation to its marketing/production budget and the hype/expectation surrounding it.

Want to play along at home? Let us know your Top 5 picks for upcoming Summer Hits, and compare them to our collective and individual predictions. Whoever scores the most correct answers WINS A BRAND NEW IMAGINARY CAR!

And now, our picks for the Top 5 HITS of Summer 2008:

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The Hollywood Reporter has learned that there’s something called “viral marketing,” which has something to do with putting a bunch of cyberweb sites up on the World Wide Netting and ensnaring geeks who have nothing better to do than click their mice-pads all day, collecting clues from the Joker that may somehow lead them to the jackpot prize of getting to watch a movie trailer two hours before everyone else.

In a cranky piece called “Summer viral camp: Feeling pinpricked yet?”, Andrew Wallenstein dissects the intricate yet ultimately nonsensical web campaigns for such blockbusters-in-waiting as The Dark Knight and Hancock. “Gone are the days when marketing a movie online involved simply buying a URL like DarkKnight.com and uploading a trailer. Warner Bros. has launched more than 30 Web sites during the past year in support of the latest in the Batman franchise, a trail of virtual bread crumbs intended to sate fans until the July 18 release.”

The trail doesn’t always end in cyberspace, however; in the case of The Dark Knight, it extends into a strange realm known as the real world.

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Superhero movies. Now that is novel! I kid, I kid. In light of the fact that filmed superhero fiction has more cultural currency today than it ever has (in both film and television), it’s interesting to observe the diversification of the genre over the past five years across movies like Sky High, parody trash like Epic Movie, and now Will Smith’s summer vehicle Hancock.

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After lording over this December's box office with the surprisingly-good I Am Legend, Will Smith returns to his natural domain...

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