WILL LOW-KEY MARKETING HELP OR HURT SUPER 8?

Tracking studies indicate that audience awareness of and interest in Super 8 has been rising in recent days, but box-office forecasters are nevertheless predicting that it’s not likely to beat the second week of last weekend’s top film, X-Men: First Class. Paramount, which is releasing the J.J. Abrams film produced by Steven Spielberg, is now estimating that Super 8 will earn around $30 million over the weekend. That’s up around $5 million from what it had been predicting a week ago. Studio executives and Abrams have said that they expect ticket sales to surge based on word-of-mouth. Paramount has preceded the film with a low-key marketing campaign, but this week, it announced that Twitter users could catch a sneak preview of the movie on Thursday by buying tickets for it via the Twitter site. (They also would receive free popcorn with any other concession purchase.) Naturally, the studio is hoping that favorable tweets about the movie will follow today (Friday).