Hollywood is gearing up for summer's blockbuster movie season, with aging Indiana Jones making a big-budget comeback and several superheroes competing for audience share with a flurry of comedies.

Theatres in the United States and Canada traditionally pull in about 40 percent of their annual ticket receipts from May to August. This year's take so far is down 3.1 percent on 2007.

Last year broke box office records, topping 9.62 billion dollars in receipts largely on the backs of 'Spiderman 3', 'Shrek the Third' and 'Transformers', each of which broke through the $300-million barrier in North America.

'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull' is the latest in the franchise about an adventure-seeking archaeologist, played by a 65-year-old Harrison Ford, and features Steven Spielberg behind the camera and 'Star Wars' creator George Lucas as producer.

The film's producers have kept mum about the storyline. But a preview shows action during the Cold War, two decades after the three previous films which took place in the 1930s.

With the involvement of the Spielberg and Lucas duo, whose impact on global box offices since the 1970s is measured in billions of dollars, the film is expected to be the season's blockbuster.

Summer of Indy

"This is definitely the summer of Indy," said Jeff Bock, a box office analyst at Exhibitor Relations.

"It's got to be one of the two top films of the summer, there's no way around it. Anything else would be a disappointment," he told AFP.

"The film has a very broad appeal," said Gitesh Pandya, another analyst.

But with 19 years since Indy last cracked his whip onscreen, Lucas has warned moviegoers against having outsized expectations from now to 22 May, when the film opens in North America.

"The fans think it's gonna be the Second Coming. And it's not the Second Coming," he said this past week in Entertainment Weekly, recalling the reaction from diehard fans to his fourth 'Star Wars' film in 1999, 16 years after 'Return of the Jedi'.

Rise of the comics

Also debuting in May is 'Iron Man', a superhero who has never hit the big screen but with Robert Downey Jr in the starring role is aimed at capitalizing on the perennial popularity of comic book characters in the United States.

Another creation of the Marvel brand, 'The Incredible Hulk' opens in June with Edward Norton as the not-so-jolly green giant, while 'The Dark Knight', the sixth 'Batman' film since 1989, hits theatres in July.

Christian Bale is again squeezing into the bat suit while the late Heath Ledger plays the wicked Joker.

Two cult television series will be in theatres as well: 'X-Files' returns 10 years after the first movie version, and 'Sex and the City' has Sarah Jessica Parker reprising her role as relationship-obsessed New Yorker Carrie Bradshaw.

Young viewers are also being targeted, with the second installment of the 'Narnia' fantasy saga due out in mid-May. The maiden Narnia film, in 2005, earned close to $300-million at the North American box office.

Action and fantasy will be competing head on with comedies, however.

"The kings of comedy are basically on tour all summer long," said Bock. Eddie Murphy, Will Smith and Mike Myers will be in the mix, as well as popular US comedians Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell and Steve Carell.

"Almost every A-list comedian except (Jim) Carrey has something coming out this summer, so the odds are good that most of those films will work," says Pandya, of boxofficeguru.com. "Because people get actioned out when seven action movies in a row open."

AFP