A look inside Hollywood and the movies : HOLLYWOOD SCUFFLE : How Many Prints Can a Dinosaur Order? As Many . . .

For anyone who believes that “Jurassic Park” is just one of a number of 800-pound movie gorillas of the summer, they don’t know the half of it. Universal Pictures has every intention of making it the Tyrannosaurus Rex of movies by ordering up 3,000 prints.

Only last summer’s “Batman Returns” made a bigger entrance, with 3,300 prints.

“It’s a fabulously entertaining picture from Steven Spielberg and it deserves a very wide release,” said Perry Katz, senior vice president of marketing for Universal Pictures.

As it is, “Jurassic Park” has its Friday opening to itself. No other studio plans to release any pictures against it--and it’s been that way for months.

The PG-13 movie directed by Spielberg, based upon Michael Crichton’s bestseller about a dinosaur theme park that goes out of control, has generated a phenomenal amount of pre-opening buzz and Universal is apparently cashing in on it.

First, it was the mystery surrounding Spielberg’s closed set, then speculation that some of the animatronic dinosaurs had to be supplemented by computer-generated ones. More recently, the “Jurassic Park” mega-merchandising campaign began and now the talk is all about reaction to the tightly controlled exhibitor screenings. Consensus: Perhaps intense for little kids, but a blockbuster nonetheless.

Michael Carmike, president of the 1,560-screen Georgia-based Carmike theater chain, explains that there is practically a built-in success factor with such a wide release. Exhibitors can get compound showings of the movie by staggering the start times, say, starting with Reel 1 on one screen and then when it’s time for Reel 2, beginning another showing. Two prints can therefore be extended to four theaters. So “Jurassic Park” could potentially play on as many as 3,500 screens.

“We’ve learned that (the staggered start-time strategy learned from “Batman Returns”) pays off really big in the first two weeks, and then you have the repeat business from teen-agers, which we fully expect,” he said.

The other side of the equation, competitors say, is that other studios’ pictures could very well get squeezed out before they have time to build an audience.

“Jurassic” is followed a week later by Columbia’s big-budgeted Schwarzenegger movie “Last Action Hero,” which is perceived to be its fiercest competitor for the action-adventure PG-13 audience, but the real battle is expected in July when theaters will see a glut of product from all genres. Many of them are expensive star vehicles.

Just a sampling: Columbia opens Clint Eastwood in “In the Line of Fire,” Paramount has “The Firm” with Tom Cruise, 20th Century Fox opens “Rising Sun” with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, Warner Bros. has the purported sleeper “Free Willy” and Buena Vista, the distribution arm of the Walt Disney Studios, opens four movies including the eighth re-release of “Snow White.”

“You’re going to see some serious re-shuffling . . . movies getting pulled, movies getting killed. It could either be the best summer we’ve had or the worst. It’s definitely not going to be boring,” said an executive at a major exhibition chain.