Time to Thank Your Stars?

In “The Player,” Griffin Mill is a studio executive on the run from the law after he’s killed a bothersome screenwriter. Hoping to distract himself from his problems, he slips off to a Hollywood desert hideaway where he explains to his new lover--the screenwriter’s girlfriend--the ingredients of a successful movie. It needs “suspense, laughter, violence, hope, heart and sex,” he says. “And happy endings. Mainly happy endings.”

During the fiercely competitive holiday season, studio executives want happy endings as much as audiences do. They’ll take them in the form of box-office success, Oscar-worthy performances, critical raves, unexpected comebacks and sleeper hits. This year, if the holiday season has one common barometer, it’s movie stars. Over the next two months, a host of A-list heavyweights, including Will Smith, Tom Hanks, John Travolta, Brad Pitt, Robin Williams and Julia Roberts will compete for Oscar and opening-weekend box-office acclaim.

If the stakes are high for actors, imagine the pressure at an under-performing movie studio needing a box-office home run to lift it out of a prolonged slump. Nowhere is there a more urgent need for an extra-base hit than at Universal Pictures, which hasn’t had a bona-fide hot ticket since the release of “The Lost World” a year and a half ago. Throughout the prolonged slump, studio chairman Casey Silver has repeatedly soothed naysayers by pointing to a year-end stockpile of potential hits.

Are they hits or misses? Here’s the lineup (and the buzz): First to the theaters, on Friday, is “Meet Joe Black,” which stars Pitt as a messenger of death who falls in love with Claire Forlani, daughter of the man (Anthony Hopkins) whose time on Earth has come to an end. The film will need every amp of Pitt’s star wattage; early viewers, citing the film’s glacial pace and three-hour running time, have called it an endurance test. “Babe: Pig in the City” arrives Nov. 25 with several key cast members returning to the original sleeper porcine hit (plus a new character played by Mickey Rooney). The sequel (which cost nearly three times the original) will benefit from considerable audience goodwill but has stiffer competition this time around, coming out so close to Disney’s “A Bug’s Life” and Paramount’s “The Rugrats Movie.”

On Dec. 4, Universal opens director Gus Van Sant’s hotly debated shot-by-shot remake of “Psycho,” which will need to attract young moviegoers to make a splash; followed by a Christmas Day release of “Patch Adams,” which stars Williams in an inspirational comic tale about a misfit doctor’s battle against the medical establishment. The early word: Steve Oedekerk and Tom Shadyac, the writer-director combination behind “The Nutty Professor,” have delivered a big hit.

Hits have also been in short supply lately at Warner Bros., which has three holiday contenders. The most likely winner: “You’ve Got Mail,” a Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan comedy about business adversaries who unknowingly fall in love via e-mail. Due Dec. 18, the film certainly has familiarity going for it. In effect, it’s both a remake and a sequel, updating Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Shop Around the Corner,” while reuniting the creative team (Hanks, Ryan and director Nora Ephron) behind “Sleepless in Seattle.” Warners’ other films are considered commercial longshots: “Home Fries,” a quirky romance with Drew Barrymore and Luke Wilson; and “Jack Frost,” a father-son fantasy adventure starring Michael Keaton and Joseph Cross.

Coming off a mixed year, in which hits like “Armageddon” and “Mulan” were offset by a string of lackluster films, Disney is the other studio with a lot riding on the holiday season. In years past, studios with family films steered clear of Thanksgiving, fearful of such Disney juggernauts as “Toy Story” and “101 Dalmatians.” This year Disney has a fight on its hands. Its ’98 entry, “A Bug’s Life,” comes armed with good early word of mouth. But it will have to compete with “Babe” and “Rugrats,” as well as persuade “Antz” fans that it brings something fresh to the battling-bugs animated film genre.

On the other hand, Disney has “Enemy of the State,” the consensus favorite among Hollywood touts as the holiday season box-office champ. Due Nov. 20, the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced paranoid thriller stars Will Smith as a young lawyer on the run after a chance encounter makes him the unknowing target of corrupt intelligence operatives. At Christmas, Disney has two other solid box-office contenders. One is “Mighty Joe Young,” which stars Bill Paxton and Charlize Theron--and Mr. Young, a 15-foot-tall gorilla that escapes from captivity and terrorizes (who else?) the citizenry of Los Angeles. The other: “A Civil Action,” which stars John Travolta in a legal thriller, based on the Jonathan Harr bestseller, about a personal injury lawyer enmeshed in a case that threatens to destroy him.

The jury is still out on “A Civil Action.” But the presence of writer-director Steven Zaillian (who won an Oscar for his screenplay adaptation of “Schindler’s List”) gives it Academy Award credentials, which is a big boost for Disney, a perennial shutout at Oscar time whose hopes for a strong “Beloved” Oscar run have faded.

Oscar talk is, of course, a popular holiday pastime. Moviegoers get to debate films’ relative merits while studios use the prospect of Oscar-worthy performances as a marketing tool to pump up interest in films that don’t come equipped with top stars or controversial subject matter. This year’s Oscar race is even harder to handicap than usual, since the contenders will be chasing a clear-cut front-runner, “Saving Private Ryan,” that bolted out of the gate in late July. Summer movies are rarely Oscar winners, but “Ryan” has the right pedigree: lofty subject matter, critical raves, a strong performance by Oscar voter-friendly Hanks and much commercial success (if it only had some British actors, it would be a shoo-in).

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Most of its competition comes with a question mark. “A Civil Action” has a good pedigree, but Disney’s past holiday-season Oscar hopefuls (“Nixon,” “Evita” “Kundun”) have been also-rans. In most years, “The Thin Red Line,” due for Christmas, would be brimming with Oscar buzz: It’s a searing World War II story adapted from an epic novel by James Jones, packed with star-power supporting roles (Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, George Clooney, John Cusack and Woody Harrelson, plus newcomer Adrien Brody). It also marks the return of acclaimed ‘70s director Terrence Malick, who’s been missing in action for 20 years. But even if it packs a wallop, it could be hurt by the inevitable comparisons to “Ryan,” which has already cemented itself in voters’ minds as an Oscar-worthy jewel.

The rest of the field is wide open, after making room for “The Truman Show,” an early-summer critical and commercial success. Miramax, whose marketing makes it a threat at Oscar time, hopes to build momentum for an “Il Postino”-style campaign around the just-released Robert Benigni film, “Life Is Beautiful,” which could benefit from its Holocaust-themed subject matter. The studio is also pushing “Shakespeare in Love,” a romantic comedy about the Bard’s bout with writer’s block. Due Dec. 4, it stars Joseph Fiennes as Shakespeare and Gwyneth Paltrow as his lover, plus supporting roles from such Anglo Oscar-voter favorites as Judi Dench, Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth.

Of the Oscar best picture possibilities, one notable is “Elizabeth,” which opened Friday. It features Cate Blanchett in the queenly title role, a performance that has already generated considerable best actress buzz. If its reviews are strong, DreamWorks’ much-anticipated “Prince of Egypt,” due Dec. 18, could be a legitimate contender. The same goes for Sony’s “Stepmom,” a family drama due Christmas Day, which could compete if its co-stars, Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts, deliver Oscar-caliber performances.

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In other releases, Woody Allen returns Nov. 20 with “Celebrity,” a meditation on fame that features Allen, plus a lineup of players that includes Winona Ryder, Kenneth Branagh, Judy Davis, Melanie Griffith and a brief appearance by Leonardo DiCaprio. If you’re looking for a high-voltage acting duel, watch for the Christmas Day release of “Hurlyburly,” an adaptation of the David Rabe play that co-stars Sean Penn and Kevin Spacey. Dennis Quaid is also getting good early buzz for his performance in “Savior,” due in late November, which stars Quaid as a diplomat on a life-or-death journey during the war in Bosnia.

When it comes to black comedy, nothing--at least this season--will top “Very Bad Things,” due Nov. 25, which features Christian Slater and Jeremy Piven as co-conspirators in the saga of a bachelor party gone bad--very bad. Things also go badly for Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton, stars of “A Simple Plan,” due Dec. 4, whose characters do all the wrong things when they stumble onto stolen money. Money is also the object of “Waking Ned Devine,” due Nov. 20, which focuses on a pair of elderly Irish rascals, played by Ian Bannen and David Kelly, who cause a small-town uproar trying to pass as lottery winners.*