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There have been bigger box office weekends this year, and ones with more groundbreaking and interesting movies. But because of what's at stake, this might be the most important box office weekend of 2012 so far.

With a $250 million price tag (though that's a slightly fudged number, with some tech development thrown in there), John Carter is one of the biggest gambles of the year, or of the past several years, to tell the truth. An adaptation of the pulp sci-fi novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs (he of Tarzan fame), John Carter plops a lone Earthling adventurer (Taylor Kitsch) down on Mars (a Mars with a native population and breathable air, but bear with us) in an attempt to free its population from ... something. Look, there's monsters and sword fights and shirtless Tim Riggins, what else do you people want?

The first live action outing from Pixar alum Andrew Stanton, this is a bit of a departure for Disney, who doesn't normally make live action films on this scale. It kind of shows in the advertising, since the early ads looked like Disney didn't quite know what to do with this film, and their expensive Super Bowl spot was a big flop. Things have rebounded a bit since then, thanks to a full court press on nerd bloggers, who have embraced it almost unreservedly. Then has come the attempt to brand it as the grand-daddy of sci-fi action adventure, which doesn't really work since most people are aware of temporal order. More mainstream reviews have been less kind to it, and it sits just below the “fresh” mark at Rotten Tomatoes.

Still, worse films with worse titles have been hits, and even lately, at that. Big budget sci-fi usually has a solid baseline audience, although it's harder for it to become a bigger hit. Disney's likely hoping for something similar to Clash of the Titans here, but is deeply hoping it doesn't end up like Prince of Persia, which it superficially resembles. The larger problem here is the perception issue. With all that money on the line and the recent publicity push, it becomes harder to sweep this under the rug if it fails. Outside of the summer season and with the hype mostly to itself, this stands half a chance – I mean, if it didn't cost $250 million. Look for around $35 million this weekend, which is going to be a tough pill to swallow.

Horror films have been stumbling around from one gimmick to another lately, so why not time to make a one-take horror film again? That's the premise behind Silent House, a remake of a Uruguayan (really) film, which stars newly minted indie darling Elizabeth Olsen. Really it should be “one-take”, as there's undoubtedly some splices hidden in there – it's a dark haunted house movie after all – but let's give them their premise for now.

Directed by the same team that brought us Open Water, another gimmicky horror film, they're likely looking for a result similar to 2008's Quarantine, which kind of restarted the found-footage horror scene, and starred a then little-known Jennifer Carpenter. The one-shot gimmick is a little harder to get people to care about (Whee! Technical skill! Scary!), but all horror seems to have a decent following. I expect around $10 million here.

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