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7) The Ugly Truth

Woman gets dream job. Woman discovers she has chauvinist boss. Woman apparently suffers from low self-esteem to the point that she winds up desperate enough to want to sleep with the chauvinist boss. Seriously, why do some women like this crap? Have some pride. Katherine Heigl has the personality of C. Montgomery Burns and Gerard Butler has the personality of a tube of toothpaste. The mere existence of this project dehumanizes all of us. And yes, it will do pretty well. These things do well for the same reason meth labs have popped up everywhere. We are a society full of emotional cutters.

8) Aliens in the Attic

Going back a full Web site, back in July of 1998, I was championing a largely unheralded children's movie from the up and coming DreamWorks SKG. The film was Small Soldiers, and while it wasn't quite as successful as the studio might hope for a $40 million production, $55 million worth of domestic revenue meant it was theoretically profitable. Given that Aliens in the Attic has a $60 million production budget, there is more at stake here. I'm not sure it's going to be big enough to justify that sort of investment, but toy sales are always the true driving force in such endeavors. I suspect that the presence of Ashley Tisdale combined with some very cute trailers does enough to make this a hit right along the lines of Small Soldiers, though.

9) Orphan

The premise of this movie is sheer genius and the Americanized version's trailers give good creep. I'm not saying that this is going to be another The Strangers or anything, but I do feel this has a chance to have a double digits opening weekend before vanishing out of theaters almost immediately, the way horror films always do.

10) I Love You, Beth Cooper

The choices for tenth place come down to this and (500) Days of Summer. While that film looks better, there is a lot more marketing involved with I Love You, Beth Cooper. I suspect that aspect combined with the presence of rising star Hayden Panettierre should be enough. What is unmistakable to anyone following this film, however, is that it is not going to be the film that fans of the book, myself included, had hoped it would be. The Larry Doyle novel is a brilliant, hysterical story and the trailers demonstrate absolutely none of its verve, particularly surprising since he also penned the screenplay. I would like to be wrong about this, but I fear it's exactly the sort of mistake that the American re-make of My Sassy Girl proved to be. What's odd is that both titles seemed to nail the all-important female lead, but it didn't help any.

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