Entertainment

Hyped To Death Star

May 18, 1999 / 2:17 PM EDT / AP

Finally, dear heavens, finally, here comes the new Star Wars movie.

Bursting through an asteroid storm of hype and dodging reviews from the Dark Side, The Phantom Menace, the prequel to the 1977 space adventure, was set to open, appropriately, when the stars came out, at midnight screenings around the country.

So much has been said and sold already that it's a foregone conclusion the film, whose entire title is Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace, will be one of the biggest of all time.

The only question is whether it has the right stuff to put up Titanic numbers.

"It's going to kill in that opening week and do just huge, unprecedented business," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office tracker Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. "But beyond that you're in a very competitive release period. Its final gross depends on how well Star Wars can just keep steamrolling through the summer."

By the inflated standards of event pictures, The Phantom Menace is actually opening in a relatively modest number of theaters - 2,950 - and on a relatively modest number of screens, about 4,000.

In contrast, Godzilla thundered onto the movie landscape last year in 3,310 theaters and on more than 6,000 screens, before becoming one of the bigger disappointments in movie history.

Even so, best estimates are The Phantom Menace will reap more than $100 million in its five-day, opening frame of Wednesday through Sunday, putting it on a pace to beat Lost World: Jurassic Park for the film-opener crown.

Lost World collected a record $90.2 million in a four-day Memorial Day weekend in 1997. It also had the highest single-day ticket sales figure: $26.1 million on the Sunday.

All-time box office leader Titanic sucked up more than $600 million in North America before it set sail for video last year. For The Phantom Menace to get anywhere near that level it will need a lot of repeat business by its core fan base of preteen and teen-age boys.

Along the way, The Phantom Menace will be competing against its ancestors. The original Star Wars is the No. 2 movie of all time. Counting its various re-issues, it has grossed $461 million domestically. Return of the Jedi has grossed $309 million, for No. 7 on the all-time list, and The Empire Strikes Back has $290 million, for ninth of all time.

How long The Phantom holds up will depend upon word of mouth by movie-goers, not critics, since this film is seen as critic-proof.

Which is a good thing for Star Wars creator George Lucas. The reviews, which dribbled out early and flooded in Tuesday, have been, with some notable exceptions, somewhere between negative and vicious.

The harshest had to be The New Yorker's Anthony Lane who likened The Phantom Menace to excrement.

More typical was Keneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, who called The Phantom Menace a "considerable letdown," a "ponderous and plodding" film that is "noticeably lacking in warmth and humor."

Those who liked film focused on the visual spectacle, and it did have its supporters. Roger Ebert, perhaps the nation's most famous critic, wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that the movie was "an astonishing achievement in imaginative filmmaking."

Produced, directed and written by Lucas, who also bankrolled the entire $115 million-plus budget, The Phantom Menace begins the back story of "Star Wars," set a generation earlier, when Darth Vader was still a cute blond kid named Anakin Skywalker, who would grow up to become Luke's absentee father.

As anyone who hasn't been living in a swamp knows by now, The Phantom Menace has already been packaged as the Big Movie You Have To See and then some.

The merchandising campaign is so far reaching that it includes not just the usual action figures and video games but special Pepsi cans that you can collect for reasons beyond recycling.

Even Colonel Sanders was brought back from the dead for a Star Wars chicken tie-in commercial.

The first of the hardcore Star Wars fans started lining up weeks ago, and when advanced tickets became available last week, there was a buying frenzy. The midnight shows sold out quickly and those who got through on the phone lines or logged onto the busy Internet sites had to settle for later dates.