How on earth did this happen?  After years of steady decline into increasingly feeble sequels and fairly pathetic self parody a new Friday The 13th film is coming and - gasp! - it has all the signs of becoming a major blockbuster. And here I though the franchise had gone away and died a decade or two back. But, nope ... after the proposed Freddy Versus Jason Versus Ash slipped into sweet oblivion when Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell refused to turn control of their beloved Evil Dead hero over to anyone else - and, no, I'm not making that up - the producers decided to step away from the comic / nostalgic road and do something entirely different. They blew the whole damn thing up and started over.

Now, signs were pretty good on this one right from the start because iconic character or no the Friday are pretty damn bad, have been pretty damn bad for a good long time, and even the most loyal fans know it. So the normal anti-remake crying just never happened on this one what with even the most ardent realizing they might get a better film out of the deal. That certainly helps its prospective chances.  Also helping is the fact that the trailer actually looks pretty damn good.

But it's not the fan enthusiasm that has me thinking that this is going to be a winner. That certainly helps but, hell, you can find obnoxious, vocal fans for anything online and last I heard the wide variety of fetishists who prowl the web have not yet made it into the mainstream. And it's not that the critics generally seem to like what they've seen so far either. If you think Friday fans give a damn what critics think then you are laughably mistaken. Nope, if you want to predict a blockbuster then I propose that all you need to do is take a look at the release schedule and the types of films releasing simultaneously.

The reasons why scheduling matter should be fairly obvious. First, if there's no competition then the films that are out there are going to take a bigger slice of the pie purely by default.  Hence Taken doing as well as it has. Second, and more importantly, all the studios know what all the other studios are putting out and generally have a good idea how the test screenings and things are going. If they know their film is testing better than the other guy's film then they'll happily go toe to toe and squish the other guy under foot. But when the tracking says that one particular title is going to dominate an age bracket, then look out. They can't get out of the way fast enough.

So let's look at the release slate, shall we? Up against Friday The 13th this week: Confessions of a Shopaholic, Under The Sea 3D, and The International. You could make an argument that there's an audience overlap between Friday and The International but it's a marginal one at best and the word on Clive and co is so bad that I say it's being trotted out there to die a quick and contract-fulfilling death.  Only two wide releases next week: Fired Up and Tyler Perry's Medea Goes To Jail.  Er, no. The week after? The Accidental Husband, a Jonas Brothers concert film, O'Horten and the new Street Fighter movie with the girl from Smallville. Getting the picture?

It's not until Watchmen arrives March 6th that anything else even remotely appealing to the Friday audience will hit screens and with the other studios basicaly surrendering the 16 - 25 male demographic for three solid weeks we could very well be looking at the first Friday movie ever to break the one hundred mil barrier. Which means they'll keep coming back forever. Now that's scary.