‘Godzilla’ Who? . . . OK, So We Can’t Always Tell the Future

Last year, we thought we’d picked a sure thing with our cover boy/girl/creature Godzilla. We figured if anyone could craft the campy Japanese sci-fi legend into box-office gold, it would be the team who made the 1996 blockbuster “Independence Day”; it did make tons of money, but not enough to match the hype.

As for our other picks? We redeemed ourselves by highlighting Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” the more accessible and successful of the year’s two World War II epics. We thought “A Bug’s Life” might be huge; we were right. We love Babe, so we gave him a nice big photo to promote his sequel, “Babe: Pig in the City.” He’s still our favorite movie pig, but he didn’t quite bring home the bacon in ’98.

The previous few summers had been ruled by big-budget sci-fi extravaganzas (“ID4,” “Men in Black”), so “The X-Files Movie,” with its built-in, demographically desirable audience, looked like it might be the summer movie to see. It wasn’t; a lowbrow, low-budget comedy--”There’s Something About Mary”--swept up.

We admit a weakness for movies that feature animals and aliens, so we gave Robert Redford’s “The Horse Whisperer” a nice color photo. The critical and commercial reaction, though, was only tepid.

“Primary Colors”: Now this film was nothing if not prescient, and the reviews were generally good, too, but for some odd reason crowds did not exactly flock to theaters to see the tale of how a charismatic Southern governor/presidential-hopeful (who has a weakness for big-haired women and doughnuts) exasperates his staff of savvy spinmeisters, not to mention his brainy stand-by-her-man wife. Sometimes folks like to go to the movies to escape reality.

We picked outrageous newcomers Trey Parker and Matt Stone as the comedy kings of ‘98; how could we have known that former “Saturday Night Live” goofball Adam Sandler would woo the masses?

Here are a few titles we spotlighted a year ago that are only making it to the big screen this year: “Carrie 2” (now called “The Rage: Carrie 2”); Mary Lambert’s “Clubland”; Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”; Sidney Lumet’s “Gloria”; Kevin Costner’s comeback film “Message in a Bottle”; Scott Hicks’ “Snow Falling on Cedars”; and Mike Newell’s “Pushing Tin.”

We’re pretty darn sure that the little sci-fi prequel that stars this year’s cover guru will be a big, big hit, but check back with us next January.