There's a moment in Prince Caspian towards the end of the first act when Lucy, the youngest Pevensie sibling, dreams she's walking through Narnia as it once was -- lush and green, with dancing trees and bright flower petals that swirl in humanoid shapes. She sees Aslan, the heroic lion, and asks why he doesn't swoop in and save Narnia once more from the darkness it's fallen under. "Nothing ever happens the same way twice," he tells her. It's arguably the most beautiful scene in the whole film, and also a fitting description for this, the second chapter in The Chronicles of Narnia series.

Prince Caspian opens as ominously as the first film -- instead of the Blitz bombing of London, however, we're given the birth of a child. He is the son of Miraz (Sergio Castellitto), the sinister brother of the late King. Having dispatched his sibling and created an heir, Miraz is ready to seize the throne -- but for his nephew Caspian. If you're thinking this sounds suspiciously like a certain Shakespearean tragedy, you wouldn't be alone. In any event, Narnia is not the place it once was: 1,300 years have passed, and a vicious race of man known as the Telmarines have taken over. They believe the land's history of magical talking animals and mythical creatures mere folklore. But Caspian's flight from certain execution reawakens the forest, and recalls the Pevensies from London -- for whom only a year has passed -- to once again defend the land.

Yes, The Chronicles of Narnia has aged and matured with its stars -- Caspian is darker, with a richer plot and more nuanced performances from the fledgling actors. But the maturation is relative. Instead of a children's story like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, this chapter is unmistakably aimed at Tweens. Almost no time is wasted on subtleties like plausible exposition -- How do we know these are the ruins of the castle Cair Paravel? Well look, here, resting pristinely on the ground, is a piece from my chess set that has managed not to tarnish or bury in over a millennium. Instead the film focuses primarily on hormone-driven eye candy: Caspian (Ben Barnes) and a wholly improbable romance between him and Susan (Anna Popplewell). Puh-leaze.

Director Andrew Adamson skyrocketed to fame with Shrek and Shrek 2. After his Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for Disney made nearly $750 million, he set his sights on the sequel, Prince Caspian. Adamson talks with AMCtv.com about bloodless violence and relaxing with video games.

Q: Can you set up Prince Caspian for us?

A: This film take place 1300 years later than the first film. The Telmarines have destroyed all that was good in the last film: Narnia has become a very dark place where evil abounds. You'll see the darkness everywhere, from the acting to the battles scenes to the sounds you hear and, of course, in the music.

Q: What did you learn from the first movie that helped you with Prince Caspian?

A: One of the things I learned was a better use of my locations. And I watched a lot of more epic films to see how others had used wide shots and the like. I didn't want to bore the audience -- I wanted to engage them completely. So I went into it very conscientiously with respect for the series of books.

Q: This film is full of battle sequences yet not much blood. There's one scene with just a dab of it on the lip.

There he goes, there goes Speed Racer -- right into a wall: Last weekend Speed Racer crashed and burned at the box office, pulling in a feeble $20 million. This gives 2008 its first major SF/F flop and assures that Warner Bros and its financing partners are going to eat most of the rumored $150 million production cost of the film (not to mention the additional tens of millions for marketing). Right now, the Wachowskis are sitting in a dark room, looking at the numbers and realizing that they really do have to stop cruising on the cred they earned on the original Matrix flick -- that's all gone now.

If Only the Wachowskis Had Released Speed Racer 31 Years Earlier
Because here's something interesting: On July 15, 1977, after several weeks in limited release, Star Wars had its official wide release and pulled in $6.8 million for the weekend, which, adjusted for inflation, would be about $20.9 million dollars today. Star Wars would go on to make more than $300 million in its initial release (a gobsmacking $930 million or so in 2008 dollars), and, of course, go down in movie history, spawning a franchise that is even now dropping films into theaters. (The animated Clone Wars, heading to screens in August.)

So, the question, which the Wachowskis might ruefully ask, is: Why does a $20 million opening spell disaster for Speed Racer today when its equivalent was absolutely fantastic for Star Wars, back in the day? Movies are still the same strips of images on film stock in 2008 as they were in 1977 -- has everything else about movies changed so much?

Well, yes. Movies are physically the same objects they were 31 years ago (although probably not for long, as more theaters go digital), and people still go to theaters to see them. But everything else about the mechanics of making money at the movies has changed.

In 1977, for example, if you were suggest to a movie executive that you should open a film in 3,600 theaters, like Speed Racer was last weekend, you would get a blank, non-comprehending stare. Star Wars -- and nearly every other movie of the time -- had its debut on just a few dozen theaters: 43, in the case of Star Wars, all clustered in and around major metro areas. If a movie did well, they'd add a few dozen more screens the next week, and a few dozen more the week after that, and so on. In all of 1977, the movie never made it into more than 1,100 theaters -- less than a third of Speed Racer's opening weekend count.

You would think that smaller number of theaters would cut down on the amount of money you could make -- and indeed, all through 1977, Star Wars never managed to make more than $7.7 million a weekend (about $25 million today). But what Star Wars could do that Speed Racer and other movies today generally can't is just keep running. From its first limited release on Memorial Day weekend, 1977, Star Wars stayed in movie theaters for nearly an entire year, and for that year, experienced very small drop-offs in business from weekend to weekend: Between ten and twenty percent each weekend. Compare this to last year's Transformers, which made $300 million in six weeks -- and experienced 40 to 50 percent dropoffs in attendance each week. In both their eras, Star Wars and Transformers are state-of-the-art blockbusters, in terms of how they made their money -- it's just that the state of the art evolved.