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The first batch of this Christmas 2011's Release Fest arrive Wednesday, with three of the six new wide release films this week entering theaters, including one of the most highly anticipated movies of the year. Get ready for movie overload.

One of them is a technically an expansion, as those people in cities without an IMAX theater get their first chance to see Mission:Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Last weekend, the fourth Mission: Impossible film opened in 425 theaters in an experimental release strategy, pulling in $12.8 million and an outstanding $30,000 per screen average. Part of this is certainly due to the higher ticket price of IMAX releases, and part due to the limited number of screenings, concentrating everyone who wanted to see the film into a giant average number. So, did the tactic work? Short answer, yes with an “if”.

There are a couple of potential pitfalls to this tactic, one pragmatic and one cosmetic. Pragmatic, in that there's $13 million worth of tickets for the movie that have been pulled away from an opening weekend figure that it appears would have (but still could be) impressive. Cosmetic, in that Mission: Impossible 4 has now started and been reported as a third place film, which could damage the perception of it in a world conditioned to see front-runners. I'm not as concerned about the latter aspect as I am about the former, but if there's any time of the year this tactic might not hurt, it's now, when there's days and days of box office bonanza to be had, and this just acts as an extended preview. While extrapolating this per screen average out to 3,400 venues is ludicrous (it's not opening to $109 million, sorry), these kind of per screen averages don't really happen to films that are flops, especially on so many (relatively speaking). We're kind of in uncharted territory here, but I think with Christmas Day involved in the equation, we should see an opening weekend of $46 million, with another $16 million for a five-day period total of $62 million.

The Americanized-remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo also hits wide release on Wednesday, with sneaks on Tuesday night. David Fincher is behind the camera for the translation of the Swedish novel to English-language cinema, after a Swedish-language trilogy made its way around the world to modest success. Probably the most famous Swedish book ever after Pippi Longstocking, it was in so many people's reading lists, you'd think everyone was taking a class on it. A disturbing tale of murder, Nazis and rough sex, it's also one of the darker best-sellers since Thomas Harris introduced Hannibal Lecter to the world.

The ace in the book and film's hole is its title character, Lisbeth Salander, a tattooed and pierced goth hacker/detective/con artist/slashslashslash... who is barely functional on a social level, but fascinating all the same. She teams up with a journalist (Daniel Craig) who's hired to investigate a decades'-old disappearance in a wealthy Swedish industrialist’s family in a remote part of that country (the Fincher adaptation thankfully keeps the setting intact, merely having all the characters speaking English). Salander is played here by Rooney Mara, last seen in The Social Network, and who will likely be gunning for an Oscar nomination (if there's a more gift-wrapped role this year, I don't know what it is).

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