Vegas-set thriller '21' has best odds

This weekend, the campaign gets intense.

Not the Clinton-Obama one, but the Sony Pictures campaign to make Jim Sturgess into a major movie star.

The 26-year-old British actor, who broke out last fall in Sony's musical "Across the Universe," has a supporting role in the studio's bodice-ripper "The Other Boleyn Girl" and now headlines its blackjack drama "21," also starring Kevin Spacey, Laurence Fishburne and Kate Bosworth.

Odds are, the PG-13-rated, Las Vegas-themed thriller will be Sturgess' biggest success yet and lead the box-office charts this weekend with ticket sales of at least $20 million. The teen-oriented spoof "Superhero Movie," made by Weinstein Co.'s genre label Dimension Films and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, looks like the strongest of today's other big releases, based on consumer tracking surveys. Paramount Pictures' "Stop-Loss" could be the latest Iraq war drama that audiences avoid in droves.

"21," adapted from the nonfiction bestseller "Bringing Down the House" at a production cost of about $35 million, has what Hollywood executives call "four-quadrant" appeal, meaning it should draw from their favorite demographic: males, females, young and old -- essentially everybody. Sturgess plays an MIT student who joins a team of math whizzes coached by Spacey's unorthodox professor character to take on the casinos using card counting to beat Vegas at its own game.

Sturgess, a bit of a young Robert De Niro type, makes teenage girls go gaga, said Valerie Van Galder, Sony's president of marketing. (Projector also admires him, though strictly for his acting ability.)

The glitzy Vegas milieu and Bosworth will attract young males, while veteran actors Spacey -- cast in an acerbic, cynical part that suits him best -- and Fishburne lend heft that should help the movie to draw older patrons.

Most of all, the true (by Hollywood standards) story of turning the tables on Vegas appeals to anyone who ever gave on the Strip.

"Superhero Movie," a PG-13 comedy starring Drake Bell from Nickelodeon's "Drake & Josh" along with lampoon legend Leslie Nielsen, Robert Hays, Nicole Sullivan and others, has a built-in audience. That would be the folks who invariably turn up for "Scary Movie," "Date Movie," "Epic Movie" and other spoof movies loaded with pop culture gags.