Movie Nation

And those two studios are Warners and Paramount, splitting the risk and the distribution of the “Inception/Dark Knight” director’s next film.

He’s been rewriting the “heroic space odyssey” script, which Steven Spielberg was originally to direct, and keeping mum about casting, etc.

Since Nolan once said he “admired” Disney’s “The Black Hole,” that could mean almost anything.

It’s about time travel, worm holes, other dimensions. His brother gets a co-writing credit and his wife produces it.

It cost some $215 million, and still didn’t land the cast necessary to guarantee success.

Projections had been running in the $85 million range for the U.S. opening  of “Oz, the Great and Powerful.” Some had thought $90 million was within reach.

But now it appears that $75 million may be the top end of that film’s opening weekend. The biggest opening weekend this year, sure. But will that be enough to put it in the black?

After “Jack the Giant Slayer” under-performed, Disney is understandably nervous. “John Carter” is the title whispered on too many lips. Typically, a film — especially a big one — needs to earn back half its cost on opening weekend.

It’s on almost 4,000 screens. It’s in 3D. Word of mouth is supposedly good, even if reviews are split.

Will it break even?

It might have to manage another $50 next weekend (they spent $100 million marketing it, according to Deadline.com) to manage that, and that would only be after all the US and worldwide grosses are tallied. Years in the making, this one really needed the extra oomph of big-name talent in the leading roles. And they didn’t get them.

“Oz, the Great and Powerful,” is opening in 3D, on almost 4,000 screens. And it has audience buzz, buzz quite separate from generally indifferent reviews (it’s better than the Rotten Tomatoes average suggests).

That could add up to $80-85 million, Variety  suggests.

Or just $72 million or so, offers the Box Office Guru.

Box Office Mojo figures $92 million+, and a robust opening overseas.

Variety also suggests that Disney is already planning an “Oz” sequel.

“Dead Man Down,” the latest misstep by Colin Farrell and his mis-managers, will be lucky to clear $5.

“Emperor” is only opening in about 260 locations. If it does $1 million, they’ll call that a win.

With all that attention focused on the original Swedish “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” very little of it seemed to have spilled over onto the director.

Was its success simply due to story and settings and Swedishness?

Maybe. “Dead Man Down,” a Hollywood production directed by Tattoo’s Niels Arden Oplev, is no ringing endorsement of his contributions to the “Tattoo” trilogy.

A weirdly eccentric character thriller, “Dead Man” boasts his original “Girl,” Noomi Rapace, playing a character almost as bizarre as Lisbeth Salendar, but unevenly so. It’s hard to decide which is worse, the sometimes manic, badly-scarred car crash survivor who wants revenge on the drunk who ruined her life, or the actress clumsily playing her.

Colin Farrell is Victor, a secretive low-level mob enforcer. Rapace is Beatrice, a French woman living with her quirky mom (the great Isabelle Huppert) in an apartment just across the way. Beatrice, scars and all, flirts with Victor, balcony to balcony. Then it’s cellphone to cellphone.

That’s followed by an awkward first date, all silences and non-sequiturs.

But darned if Beatrice doesn’t blurt out that she knows what Victor does, and that he’d better get her revenge for her, or she’ll rat him out to the cops.

The drunk driver “ruined my life! I have nothing! I AM nothing!”

And Victor, unlike any other mobster/hit man you’ve ever heard of, lets her get away with it. Maybe he’s got a soft spot for French women. Maybe he sees a connection to her, a connection that hints at his own motives for doing what he does.

The kingpin Victor and his pal Darcy (Dominic Cooper) work for keeps losing henchman, and getting messages – clues, snips of a photograph that will eventually tell him who is tormenting him and stalking him.

Since that mob boss is played by Terrence Howard, we’re pretty sure he’s going to break down in tears, at some point. Just how miscast the actor is in this part is obvious in a single scene with veteran character actor Armand Assante. THIS is how a mob boss carries himself and sounds.

F. Murray Abraham is Victor’s secret pal, a Hungarian who wants him to “Always kill the Devil when you find him.”

The somewhat confusing plot meanders toward a laughably predictable conclusion, but not before director and screenwriter try their hand at moments so random they don’t belong in the film, at flourishes so deft that they belong in a better movie. Victor has taken this other Albanian hoodlum hostage, stashing him in the hold of the rusting hulk of the luxury liner S.S. United States, the most striking throw-away movie set you will ever see.

Rapace is all over the place with her performance — needy, then self-assured, enraged, then in love. The always feral Farrell seems as dismayed by her as the rest of us.

Huppert, who played Madame Bovary in her prime, plays a character who is all hearing-aid jokes, innuendo and Tupperware talk, pulling out the photo album so that Victor can see Beatrice before her accident – “You can see she has good genes.”

The odd character turn, unusual location and burst of cleverly profane dialogue doesn’t rescue the muddle that is “Dead Man Down.” But considering its bloodlines, maybe it would make more sense in Swedish, with subtitles.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language throughout and a scene of sexuality

Cast: Colin Farrell, Noomi Rapace, Terrence Howard, Dominic Cooper, Isabelle Huppert

Credits: Directed Niels Arden Oplev, written by J.H. Wyman. A FilmDistrict release.

Running time: 1:50

For the first time in over a month, filmgoers are worked up to go see something new at the movies this weekend.

Thanks to “Oz, the Great and Powerful.”

Sam Raimi’s “Wizard of Oz” prequel is expected to do upwards of $80 million on its opening weekend. The reviews? Those who will never forgive the idea of touching “The Wizard of Oz” panned it. Others went after the weak, third-choice cast (me included).

But most of us give it a pass. Compare it to “Jack the Giant Slayer,” and at least this one has a dash of wit and a lot of fun uses of 3D.

“Emperor,” which uses a fictional love story to underline the American role in rebuilding-reshaping postwar Japan, a period when everybody BUT Emperor Hirohito paid the price for Japanese war mongering and atrocities, is earning weaker reviews. I was OK with it, up to a point.

There are people who love laughably gratuitous violence, unadulterated carnage and depravity on the big screen. Not my thing, really. “The ABCs of Death” is a collection of short films in that vein. Among those contributing to the 26 films there, the guy who did “Hobo with a Shotgun.” Some work, some don’t. Mixed to weak reviews for that one.

Orlando area filmgoers, remember the great doc 56 Up” comes to The Enzian, as well as a terrific music documentary, “Sound City.”

Deadline.com reports that the new film by Alejandro Gonzalez Innarito (“Amores Perros,”
“Babel,” “Biutiful,” “21 Grams”) will be titled “Birdman,” and that it will shoot in an empty theater on Broadway this spring.

Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Zach Galfianakis and now Edward Norton are in the cast.

Per Deadline — “A former actor (Keaton) who once played a superhero puts together a play on Broadway that is based on a short story by Raymond Carver. Unfortunately, the ex-superhero’s plans to soar again are threatened by his egotistical lead stage actor. Norton will play that actor.”

A role written with Keaton in mind? Must be.

Of this cast — and let’s include the director — Keaton, Stone and Galfianakis are known for comedies. The rest? Sometime. Except for Innarito.