The biggest flop of the summer? I liked Poseidon and all, but financial prospects for this Warner Bros. release (5.12) are not good. It cost $160 million to make. To be regarded as a seriously performing hit, a movie of this sort needs to bring in $35 or $40 million on opening weekend. Right now, 10 days from opening day, tracking indicates perhaps a $15 million opening weekend at best. Having decided against a nationwide sneak last weekend, Warner Bros. is now trying to jack up interest with big ad buys. A 90-second trailer ran last night on NBC’s Deal or No Deal, which is “very unusual”, a marketing guy tells me. (Most TV spots for upcoming films run 15 to 30 seconds). Poseidon is a bracingly good disaster film as far as it goes, but interest levels are low. If it triples its opening weekend earnings Poseidon may end up with something like $45 million domestically. Obviously foreign, home video and cable will add to this, but that’s still a fairly sucky number for a big movie like this. It should ideally earn at least $150 million domestically, and it may not even do a third of that.

The latest NRG numbers on The DaVinci Code are huge — 94% general awareness, 58% definite interest and 25% first choice. Ron Howard’s film (and I have to say that David Poland’s nickname for this film — Opie’s Dae — is inspired) may be the biggest film of the summer because it seems to have the broadest advance interest among the four quadrants. It doesn’t appear to be as big with under-25s as, say, Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest or Brett Ratner‘s X-Men: The Last Stand but still…

This morning marks the launch of what I’m calling “Elsewhere Now“, which is the new default version of Hollywood Elsewhere. From here on, the front page of the column will be a series of items all running the same length, most of them WIRED-type quickies (which can be read in their entirety on the main page or, if they’re longer than 105 words, will require a jump) with a thrice-weekly feature story thrown in with a little clapboard icon signifying this. For those of you who hate change in any form, this isn’t as big a shake-up as it might seem. If you don’t like the new design just click on “switch to Elsewhere Classic” and you’ll be taken to the standard page with the “old” design (i.e., the one I started with in September 2004). There may be one or two more tweaks or touch-ups over the next day or so, but nothing much. Two designers co-created this new look — one of them is Team Elsewhere’s Jon Rahoi — and if you ask me a beyond-splendid job has been rendered. (Rahoi, a San Francisco-based programmer and web design professional, lists Amazon, Hewlett-Packard and Lucent among his clients.) In any case, sweating out this new design plus being in Houston and travelling on Continental Airlines is why I haven’t posted as much as I usually do the last three days, but it’ll be the usual-usual from here on. I mean, it won’t be the usual-usual because now there are two (clap!), two (clap!)…two Hollywood Elsewhere’s in one.

I for one (and I know I’m not the only one) thoroughly respect Universal honcho Ron Meyer‘s decision in late December 2004 to drive out to a prison in Taft, California, in order to visit wiretapper Anthony Pellicano, who was incarcerated there. Nobody loves you when you’re down and out, and you can double or triple that if you’re behind bars. So in my view guys who visit you in the slammer (especially during the Chistmas holidays) are good hombres . Obviously Meyer’s visits implies this or that, but let’s take a second and acknowledge what loyalty is all about .