Studio executives hope they’ve trained their audience well as the season of summer blockbusters arrives.

From May through mid-August, Hollywood will bank on the idea that there is at least one movie every week _ and sometimes two _ that you simply must see.

Summer features such box-office staples as Will Smith, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller and Jack Black, and brings back beloved characters such as Indiana Jones, Batman, Speed Racer, Carrie and her “Sex and the City” gal pals, the “Narnia” kids, the Incredible Hulk and two very different agent couples: paranormal troupers Mulder and Scully and comic spies Maxwell Smart and Agent 99.

A look at the lineup:

JULY 11: Brendan Fraser finally offers scientific proof that there is an albino dinosaur at the Earth’s core _ and he does it in 3-D.

“Journey to the Center of the Earth” is a modern twist on Jules Verne’s classic tale presented entirely in three-dimensional digital video that practically sets the characters and effects in the audience’s lap.

Gimmicky old 3-D films “made the brain and eyeballs do calisthenics. Frankly, it made you feel kind of queasy and ill,” Fraser said. “This allows you to live in the environment that the actors inhabit.”

The weekend’s other big name, Eddie Murphy, gets to inhabit his own weird environment _ himself _ in the comedy “Meet Dave.”

Murphy stars as the leader of a group of tiny aliens scouting Earth because their own race is endangered. They blend in with humanity by tooling about in a ship that looks just like Eddie Murphy.

“He’s robotic and not quite in control of his form, his human form,” said co-star Elizabeth Banks. “Eddie’s performance, he has a lot of naivete about the world around him. He comes off as being extremely strange and odd, and that naivete translates very nicely into charm.”

From the Urbana Daily Citizen