Cloudy skies over the box office

(andPOP) - It's the first weekend in months with no sequels or remakes hijacking the box office, and sadly, it's looking pretty bland.

But one thing the new releases do have going for them is variety.

Stealth has Jamie Foxx waving his Oscar around and saving the world from a rogue superjet... or something. In case you can't tell from the trailer that seems to be running every time you turn the TV on, it's an action film with lots of explosions. Sort of like The Island. Not to compare a promising new movie with last week's sunken stone or anything.

For the families who have seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory five times already, Disney's Sky High is a good choice for the kids. The titular school is responsible for educating tomorrow's superheroes, like the child of Kurt Russell and Kelly Preston.

And representing the rom-com... we have Must Love Dogs!

Over at Comingsoon.net, the consensus is that Sky High soars and Stealth, well, sucks. But insiders predict that Stealth will do the most business, with a projection of about $20 million, because of heavy promotion. It may be possible that it'd do for jets what The Fast and the Furious did for cars, i.e. nothing for me.

Most industry observers think Stealth will land just behind the Vince Vaughn-Owen Wilson comedy Wedding Crashers, which dropped just 24% last weekend and could accordingly hit the $20 million mark in its third round.

That would still be a huge drop from the same weekend last year, when M. Night Shyamalan's The Village grossed $51 million.

The summer blockbusters are being slowed by declining ticket sales, but documentaries are still hot, especially one about a very intriguing animal: the emperor penguin.

Reuters reports that French director Luc Jacquet's March of the Penguins is climbing the charts to top $12 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales. "This is a breath of fresh air in terms of positive news on the box office front, and it also shows that people want something different," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office tracking company Exhibitor Relations Inc.. "They want something unique."

The gorgeously-shot, poignantly-told story of the penguin mating season will become the fourth highest-grossing documentary of all time in domestic theatres. Even Michael Moore's Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine could be beaten when March of the Penguins expands to 1,400 theatres on August 5, from just under 700 currently.

The documentary, adopting the narrative style of a feature film, follows the penguins on a harrowing march across the frozen face of Antarctica to their mating grounds. There are no car chases or big explosions, but I kid you not, I was enthralled. Jacquet and a four-man crew spent 14 months in what is literally the far ends of the earth filming the penguins. He compares his film to an Impressionist painting, saying, "I wanted to tell a story that would capture emotional involvement."

I'd pick penguins over fighter jets any day.