White guys like John Travolta (“Battlefield Earth”) and Robert De Niro (“The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle”) may be sinking this summer, but black talent is thriving.

The sleeper hit of the season is Dimension Films’ “Scary Movie,” a lecherous, R-rated deconstruction of its own “Scream” series that opened to a record-shattering $42 million; it may eventually gross $140 million or more. The film, which belongs to director Keenen Ivory Wayans, along with his screenwriter/actor brothers Shawn and Marlon, has become the biggest hit, by far, by any black director in history. The fact that it isn’t a “black” movie per se — the cast is integrated, but its gross-out humor is aimed at slasher-movie tropes, not racial issues — makes it even more of a landmark achievement, albeit a low-rent one.

Earlier this summer, Martin Lawrence — until now, the poor man’s Eddie Murphy (they worked together in last year’s prison comedy “Life”) — did a little cross-dressing of his own. The result, “Big Momma’s House,” was a surprise hit for 20th Century Fox. Fox expected Jim Carrey’s “Me, Myself and Irene” to walk off with cash. Instead, the $51 million “Irene” looks as if it will stall at about $90 million while Lawrence’s $30 million “Momma” coasts to a highly profitable $115 million.

For African-American Hollywood, 2000 is turning out to be a breakthrough year. When the box-office dust settles, Hollywood will be hard-pressed to continue consigning black performers and directors to what the industry euphemistically refers to as “urban moviegoers.”

How bad was that ghetto? Before Wayans, only a handful of black directors had ever been allowed to helm major projects that didn’t deal specifically with African-American themes. The most notable exceptions: Actor-turned-director Forest Whitaker, who scored a hit with ’95′s “Waiting to Exhale,” was entrusted with the white-bread Sandra Bullock romance “Hope Floats” in ’98; that same year, F. Gary Gray notched a modest success with the by-the-book thriller “The Negotiator,” starring Kevin Spacey and Samuel L. Jackson. Now Wayans has leapfrogged over all of them, landing in a position to lay claim to any material — or, at least, any broad comedy material — he wants.

Blacks have been generating cash this summer in other genres as well: John Singleton has racked up a solid $68 million to date with his recycling of “Shaft.” On those oversize IMAX screens, “Michael Jordan to the Max” has slam-dunked $8 million in just 80 days — by contrast, “Siegfried & Roy” has collected only half as much after nearly a year on the IMAX circuit.

And replaying a symbiotic relationship as ingrained in American culture as Huck Finn and his rafting buddy Jim, almost every blockbuster success out there features at least one black supporting player as a sidekick: Ving Rhames guides Tom Cruise through his paces in “M:i-2.” Though some critics made a fuss about Cruise’s interracial romance with Thandie Newton, the movie itself treated it as a nonissue, and the movie’s huge audience apparently agreed. Djimon Hounsou of “Armistad” protected Russell Crowe’s flank in “Gladiator.” And the crew of “The Perfect Storm” drafted a black sailor (Allen Payne), even if the producers couldn’t figure what to do with him besides dump him in the drink.

All of which suggests that moviegoers, if not exactly colorblind, are a lot more inclusive than Hollywood generally gives them credit for. Sadly, when the studios turn out specifically black-themed movies — and pitch them primarily to that “urban” audience — they quickly hit a wall. This spring, the New Line romance “Love & Basketball” sputtered out after collecting just $27 million; and last year, Universal’s buppie drama “The Best Man” stalled out at $34 million. If a movie appears to be about blacks, its appeal is limited; but if marketing forces can convince moviegoers that it’s about something else — like, say, funny cop goes undercover — its black milieu doesn’t necessarily get in the way of its finding a larger audience.

“The business is always worrying that if you do a black movie, it won’t break out, but if you make something with mass appeal, it will,” contends “Big Momma’s House” co-producer David Higgins. When African-American screenwriter Darryl Quarles first pitched the project, he argued that the movie’s gimmick wasn’t drag, per se, but rather its setting in a matriarchal society in which big mommas rule. That apparently resonated with a seemingly unlikely demographic alliance. “In terms of our audience polling,” explains Higgins, “we knew Martin had a strong following in the African-American community. But the next tier group that really responded to it were women from 45 to 60, regardless of race. And the added element that surprised us were pre-teenagers from 8 to 12. It became a bit more of a family movie than we originally expected.”

Of course, one strong summer doesn’t guarantee that black filmmakers couldn’t find themselves consigned just as quickly back to their traditional ghetto. Murphy himself suffered through a cold streak in the early ’90s, which didn’t end until he stumbled into “The Nutty Professor” and then “Doctor Dolittle.” And Hollywood appears in no rush to offer him more-serious roles (as it has for Carrey and Robin Williams), although his gift for mimicry suggests a broad range he has yet to fully tap.

Still, for now, the success of “Scary Movie” and “Big Momma” and the likely triumph of Eddie Murphy make for the sort of black movies Hollywood really likes — those with grosses and nets squarely in the black.

Fox’s animated fantasy “Titan A.E.” crashed and burned; Jim Carrey’s schizoid “Me, Myself and Irene” ($80 million to date) is falling well short of the Farrelly Brothers’ “There’s Something About Mary” ($178 million). And in the middle of everything, Rupert Murdoch summarily axed Fox chairman Bill Mechanic, a man widely considered to be one of the few straight-shooters and genuine risk-takers in the business (quite a compliment in this town).

Based on pre-release tracking studies of potential moviegoers — Joe Farrell’s National Research Group provides the raw data, which the studios then subject to their own analyses — Fox was cautiously predicting a $30 million to $35 million “X-Men” opening. Cautiously.

Fox had at least demonstrated some fiscal prudence. Singer’s movie happens to be a relatively cheap piece of filmmaking. Fox insisted that the director (who made 1998′s commercial dud, “Apt Pupil,” after a promising start with 1995′s “The Usual Suspects”) work on a pared-back $75 million budget; its two top stars, Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen, are hardly high-paid matinee idols.

It turned out to be a good investment. In its first weekend, “X-Men” earned $54.5 million, immediately replacing “Men in Black” (1997) as Hollywood’s biggest July opening. Even more impressively, it posted the sixth-biggest three-day opening on the box-office sheets. And since the top five movies that it trails — ranging from “The Lost World” ($72.1 million) to “Austin Powers 2″ ($54.9 million) — are all sequels, it can boast it’s the best-opening non-sequel ever.

So what could have possible fueled such an “X-Men” frenzy?

How about the Net?

Based on comic series created in 1963 by long-time Marvel cartoonists Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, “X-Men” had scooped up a lot of fans over the years. Some of the more hardcore variety eagerly monitored the movie as it moved into production with a proprietary sense of involvement. Vancouver, British Columbia, webmaster Patrick Sauriol’s Coming Attractions began stalking the project in ’96 — and the earliest posts from obsessed fans were more flames than plaudits. Reacting to the news that Singer had taken on the job of bringing this unusual brood to the screen, one anonymous poster ranted in ’97, “Why the heck are you guys getting so excited about this X-Men film? This is a director who hates comic books … this film is going to be a true disaster … take that from someone who has been in the room with the producers, people who are truly without a clue.”

Sauriol, who eventually compiled 11 archives and over 100 screen pages of detailed exegesis devoted to the film, claims “X-Men” certainly got more attention from the Internet community than any other movie this summer. “For a long time, people didn’t know what to make of it,” he says. “The bad rewrites and last-minute reshoots put worry into the minds of a lot of fans. When we broke the costume designs, people were saying, ‘Oh, no, it’s just a ‘Matrix’ rip-off.’”

Naturally, Fox executives have likened their own efforts to build a Web presence for the movie to Artisan Films’ successful Internet campaign for “The Blair Witch Project.” But “Blair Witch” came out of nowhere; with “X-Men,” Fox had to find a way to channel all that untamed “X-Men” energy already coursing throughout the Web.

“What we strived to do with ‘X-Men,’” explains Jeffrey Godsick, Fox’s executive vice president of publicity and promotion, “was launch a new phase for movie Web sites in general. Most sites attract fans for just about two weeks before a movie opens and two weeks afterwards. We wanted to build online communities that would sustain the fans for months.”

Last September, the studio triggered a semi-stealth campaign, erecting the Mutant Watch Web site, a virtual parody of a flag-waving political Web site, ostensibly devoted to a campaign by the McCarthyesque Sen. Kelly, the fictional politico played in the movie by Bruce Davison, to protect America’s children from the mutant threat. Readers were invited to turn in their mutant friends — and, even more importantly, to hand over their e-mail addresses to the Fox marketers.

Then, in April, Fox launched its official “X-Men” site. Again, this featured lots of interactive lures: To enter “Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters,” surfers were invited to take an “entrance exam” that would identify their genetic enhancements; different readers were granted access to specific rooms, but if they wanted to explore the whole school site, they needed to trade identities with friends.

“The marketing around the Mutant Watch phenomenon was hip and smart,” says Sauriol, though he judged the official site “disappointing. It took too long to watch. It tried to be slick without enough substance.”

The studio didn’t stop there, though. It also offered materials to existing fan sites like Counting Down, the site that grew up around “Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace.” McKellen, who maintains an extensive site of his own, jumped into the act, publishing an on-set diary and providing chatty responses to readers’ e-mail queries. “Patrick Stewart squeezed my shoulders once during the first reel, which I took as a compliment,” he reported of the movie’s premiere on New York’s Ellis Island. Fox has now turned its “X-Men” site into a virtual auction house: Wednesday morning, Cyclops’ battle uniform had been bid up to $15,260, while Magneto’s worn socks could be had for a mere $77.50. Mutants, indeed.

Exactly how much did the Fox sites contribute to the movie’s opening? Opinions differ. “If you’d asked me that question before we opened, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you,” says Godsick. “But they clearly had some impact. In our exit polling, 27 percent of the people we polled said they’d visited the ‘X-Men’ Web site, and among the self-identified fans, 50 percent had visited the sites. There is no norm for that, but those figures are extremely high.”

Of course, it all could have blown up in the studio’s face if the movie hadn’t delivered. Bad buzz spreads on the Web faster than kudzu. And given that its final post-production crunch delayed the movie’s completion, there wasn’t much time to get the potential good word out. The first screening of a final print for junketeering press didn’t take place until July 6. But like a town crier, the Web leaped into action. Coming Attractions immediately posted three reviews, based on that first screening, and the ecstatic reactions ranged from “one of the BEST movies I’ve seen in a LONG time” to “this movie is going to be THE HIT of the summer” to “AWESOME!” As Sauriol sums it up, “About a week and a half before the movie opened, opinion on it really changed.”

For the moment, the ‘X-Men’ Web campaign is the new gold standard for effective Internet hype — even if New Line’s elaborate “Lord of the Rings” setup is already nipping at its heels. As for the future, Godsick predicts, “We’re looking to try and develop a true long-term and strategic campaign for every movie. It doesn’t need to be a movie with a built-in fan base. It’s safe to say that next summer, ‘The Planet of the Apes’ will have a huge Internet presence.”

Time to teach monkeys to type.

Consider the numbers: Since the book’s first printing effectively sold out — in Los Angeles, the Borders on La Cienega Boulevard devoured its Potter allotment on Friday night — its publisher, Scholastic Press, could theoretically claim an opening weekend gross of $90.8 million. (That’s 3.5 million copies at a list price of $25.95.) Of course, lots of bookstores and online sellers were discounting the thing by 30 to 40 percent. But even an across-the-board discount of 35 percent still produces an opening weekend haul of $59 million — bigger than any other movie this season. By comparison, “M:i-2,” the leader of the pack, scored $57.85 million over the Friday-to-Sunday portion of the Memorial Day weekend. Last weekends surprise hit, Dimension Films’ gross-out horror parody “Scary Movie,” racked up $42.3 million, the largest opening ever for an R-rated flick. (Advance tracking had low-balled its appeal, predicting a $32 million opening.) “The Perfect Storm,” the July Fourth winner, posted $41.5 million over its first three days.

Figure it another way: What if the latest “Harry Potter” had actually been a movie opening? Those 3.5 million book-buyers would have conservatively translated into 10.5 million tickets — presuming each book-buyer brings a parent and a sibling or friend. At an average ticket price of $5, that amounts to $52.5 million — easily. Again, it’s a number that would have challenged any of this summer’s so-called box-office hits. No wonder the weekend’s lone family-friendly feature, “Disneys The Kid” — which stars Bruce Willis as a man who literally encounters the child within — opened to a lackluster $12.7 million. It had the misfortune of facing the “Harry” juggernaut.

“The movie did just about the business we expected it to,” insists one Disney insider. Still, it’s a reasonable assumption that Harry fans — having stayed up late Friday to buy the book, and then passed the rest of the weekend buried in its 734 pages — were in no need of a Disney fix (so much for the shameless use of “Disney” in the film’s title).

Nonetheless, “It was an extraordinary weekend,” argues Sony Pictures distribution chief Jeff Blake. “Business was up 25 percent over last year.” According to Blake, “No one knew ‘Scary Movie’ would do $43 million. Both ‘The Perfect Storm’ and ‘The Patriot’ had strong holds on their second weekend, ‘Chicken Run’ held on and ‘The Kid’ has gone on to do $1.8 million on Monday and $1.7 million Tuesday, so I dont think you can count it out yet.”

Perhaps, but the Potter phenomenon could still teach Hollywood a thing or two. In a summer when movie sales have been slack — after a powerful May, thanks to “Gladiator” and “M:i-2,” the box-office slumped during June; even after the July Fourth rally, total sales for the season are still off 3 percent from last year’s totals — you dont need a degree from Hogwarts to learn a few lessons:

1) It’s the story, stupid. Monday-morning box-office quarterbacks love to blame the marketing: Could “Dinosaur” have amassed more than its disappointing $130 million if it had opened in mid-June (Disney’s traditional post-school turf) rather than mid-May? It’s arguable. Was Sony foolishly cocksure to open Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot,” with its musty history-lesson mood, opposite the more escapist “The Perfect Storm”? Given that “Storm” walloped “Patriot,” in retrospect, it sure looks like that might have been the case.

But instead of blaming the messengers, look at the goods they’re trying to deliver. At a July Fourth barbecue, I spent time with a family whose 11-year-old daughter could talk about nothing but the impending release of Potter — she’d read each of the first three books three times and chatted about the further adventures of Harry, Ron and Hermione as if they were her idiosyncratic best friends. Had the kids been to see “Dinosaur”? I asked. Sure, their parents said, but the movie’s story line seemed so overly familiar, not even the first-rate special effects impressed them. They certainly didn’t clamor for a repeat visit. “When you’re dealing with a wide release, once it gets up to around $180 million, then everybody has seen it once,” observes Tom Sherak, chairman of the 20th Century Fox Film Group. “You need a lot of repeat business to go beyond that.” Adds Blake, “So far, there doesn’t appear to be a ‘Something About Mary’ that has an extraordinary hold from week to week.” It’s that lack of repeat moviegoers that has kept this season’s big movies from breaking through into the rarefied atmosphere of a “The Sixth Sense.” Maybe, instead of simplifying story lines — reducing them to lowest common denominators — Hollywood should beef them up, especially if it would like moviegoers to take a second look.

2) Dont trash the prototype. A sequel should show some respect for the original work on which it’s based. You have to give Rowling credit. In each successive Potter book, she reworks the same formula: Harry escapes the dreary Dursley household and heads off to another academic year at Hogwarts where he battles the evil forces unleashed by the shadowy villain Voldemort. Nevertheless, Rowling keeps embroidering, adding more details and surprises. Now look at “M:i-2.” The first “Mission: Impossible” film in ’96 effectively trashed the TV franchise on which it was based, unmasking team leader Jim Phelps, played by Jon Voight, as a duplicitous traitor. Beyond a fetish for latex, the new “Mission” doesn’t even bother with the familiar tropes — instead of assembling a team of disparate talents, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, who’s now a virtual lone wolf, just recruits a couple of buddies. Instead of an impossibly complicated con job, the movie settles for John Woo-style mano-a-mano combat. Sure, “M:i-2,” which has earned $203 million to date, has outgrossed the original, which collected $180 million in domestic ticket sales. But, even if it climbs to an eventual $220 million or so to become the summer’s biggest hit, it will still fall far short of last summer’s second-place finisher, “The Sixth Sense,” which scared up $294 million.

Meanwhile, the rest of the season’s sequels and remakes have done far worse. “Shaft,” which failed to capture the sexual swagger of its 1971 forebear, is headed toward a midrange $70 million haul. And Universal’s two attempts at retro programming — “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle,” which absurdly turned Boris and Natasha into flesh-and-blood antagonists, and “The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas,” which took the cut-rate prequel route — are out-and-out flops.

3) Mystery sells. The newest Potter debut is even more astonishing considering that Rowling and her publishers held back the novel’s name, as well as any description of its contents, to the very last minute. By creating an aura of secrecy, they added to the frenzy surrounding its arrival.

By comparison, Hollywood — which spends about $24.5 million per film (and even more in the crowded summer months) hawking its wares — gives away entire stories with trailers and TV ads that are mini plot summaries. By the time many movies open, you feel youve already seen them. Certainly, “Rocky’s” swan dive couldnt have surprised anyone whos suffered through the lame gags in its preview clips. If that was the best the movie had to offer — pass. And if Warner Bros. could have kept John Travoltas dreadlocked mugging under wraps in “Battlefield Earth,” maybe the movie wouldn’t have bombed so badly. (Naw, don’t think so — see Lesson No. 1.)

The one movie sell that did emulate some of “Harry’s” sleight-of-hand was Warner’s “The Perfect Storm.” Even though it too was based on a bestseller, its marketing — focused on that perfect wave upending a tiny boat — effectively disguised the saga’s downbeat ending. The media may have thought it knew the score, but, as one friend who had never read the book confessed to me, he sailed into the film based on the trailer expecting its heroes to survive. “They did a really good job of marketing, emphasizing the excitement of the boat on the water, and the public bought into it just like they bought into ‘Twister,’” notes Sherak. “A lot of old-timers thought once the public realized the characters die that it would bother them, but that didn’t prove to be true.”

But the real test for Warner Brothers comes on Nov. 16, 2001. That’s when it has scheduled the release of Chris Columbus’ adaptation of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” which has yet to begin filming. The boffo opening of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” has set a high standard by which the movie’s debut will be judged. After all, there’s nothing worse than a bad magic trick.

If the prognosticators are correct, “Monty’s” newest incarnation will add another chapter to an ongoing Cinderella story. The first installment began when the movie was unveiled at the ’97 Sundance Film Festival. The little $3.5 million project, funded by 20th Century Fox’s Searchlight Pictures, took audiences by surprise and stunned the industry, raking in $46 million at the box office in this country and a whopping $198 million abroad. “Monty” would go on to garner four Academy Award nominations — including one for best picture — and nab an Oscar for Anne Dudley’s comedy score. No sooner had the movie opened, reports Lindsay Law, then president of Searchlight, than “we got an extraordinary number of requests, probably 45-60 of them, from theatrical producers around the world wanting to turn it into a stage show. That turned my head to looking at it as a full-fledged musical, and we began exploring the idea.”

Hit movies don’t necessarily make boffo Broadway, though — a painful lesson that Fox itself learned when a thudding “musicalization” of its hit 1988 Tom Hanks comedy, “Big,” opened in ’96 and promptly disappeared after only 22 previews and 192 performances. Andrew Lloyd Weber’s ’94 version of “Sunset Boulevard” lasted just two and a half years — a minor run for the “Cats” man. “Footloose,” a wan, carbon-copy version of the ’84 Kevin Bacon flick, just closed after 737 performances — though audiences nationwide won’t be spared an upcoming national tour. An equally panned stage mounting of “Saturday Night Fever,” which opened last year at Broadway’s Minskoff Theater, continues to hold its own, but John Travolta needn’t worry that it will ever crowd out memories of the ’77 classic on which it’s based.

“There’s nothing new in Broadway musicals adapting featherweight entertainment,” observes Jack Verteil, creative director of Jujamcyn Theaters, which has booked “The Full Monty” for its Eugene O’Neill Theater. “Back in the ’50s, shows like ‘Damn Yankees’ or ‘The Pajama Game’ were based on light novels. Today, those light novels are more likely to be TV shows or movies. Certainly, when you’re working with a popular title like ‘Saturday Night Fever,’ it makes it easier to raise financing and book tours, often sight unseen. But it may also work negatively. ‘Footloose’ and ‘Saturday Night’ seem so recent that audiences can always go out and rent the video. They don’t necessarily have to spend $80 to see them on Broadway.”

Still, Broadway producers, eager to transfer a marquee brand name from the cineplex to the Great White Way, continue to force movie adaptations onto the stage: “The Witches of Eastwick,” which began life as a 1984 John Updike novel before morphing into the problematic ’87 Jack Nicholson feature, is currently having its kinks worked out in London. Marvin Hamlisch, composer of “A Chorus Line,” is working on a stage version of the ’57 classic “Sweet Smell of Success” — John Lithgow will appear as fearsome gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker in a workshop this fall — and then plans to join forces with Woody Allen for a musicalization of “Bullets Over Broadway.” Even a relative trifle like the 1967 flapper comedy “Thoroughly Modern Millie” is being brought to the stage.

But before those other projects move forward, perhaps they should take a few cues from Law, who has made a number of shrewd moves to ensure that the new “Monty” lives up to the original. First, he has refused to take in any producing partners — a rarity these days, when most Broadway shows are top heavy with corporate investors.

“Normally, when a studio licenses a show to a Broadway producer, it loses control. But we didn’t want to do anything that would damage the film’s name,” says Law. And so he took the lead in developing the show himself — leaving Searchlight in January to work on it full time — and Fox agreed to shoulder the costs, which are expected to reach $7 million, twice the movie’s budget, by the time the show reaches Manhattan.

Second, Law forswore the easy “Saturday Night Fever” route of merely replicating the original’s songs in the stage version. “Simply duplicating the movie didn’t seem a very exciting choice,” he says. “That just exploits the title, but to what end? You really need to give audiences something new and different or I don’t think the stage version can be assured a long life of its own.” With theater vets such as director Jack O’Brien (artistic director at the Old Globe, where he first mounted the ’94 Broadway revival of “Damn Yankees”) and playwright Terrence McNally (who wrote the adaptations for “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and “Ragtime”) on board, the decision was made to transfer the lads in “The Full Monty” from unemployment lines in Sheffield, England, to Buffalo, N.Y.

But Law’s riskiest decision was signing first-time Broadway composer David Yazbeck (whose previous credits range from “Late Night With David Letterman” to “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?”) to handle words and lyrics. “I remembered back to when I was in college and first saw [1968's] ‘Promises, Promises,’ with its music and lyrics by Burt Bacharach and Hal David,” explains Law. “That was a new sound then, terrific and contemporary. It wasn’t ‘Climb Every Mountain.’ A lot of people recommended David. He writes in quirky, different styles. He did a couple of songs on spec — and that was it.”

After too many years of stentorian sung-through musicals — from “Les Miz” to “Jekyll & Hyde” — Yazbeck’s clever tunes are refreshingly unpretentious. (He even works casually dropped four-letter words into the lyrics.) The first-act curtain number “Michael Jordan’s Ball” allows the struggling lads to discover their inner stripper as they mimic the basketball ace’s moves on the court; the second act opens with a classic Broadway showstopper, “Jeanette’s Blues,” as veteran character actress Kathleen Freeman (who has racked up supporting parts in 124 features and 60 TV shows), playing the boys’ piano player, belts out a lament for the bum showbiz acts she has seen in her time. Yazbeck’s score even includes a mock love song a man sings to his oversize stomach.

With just a few exceptions — like Andrew De Shields of “The Wiz” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’” — the “Monty” cast is made up of relative unknowns. But that hardly matters. The show’s title is its star, and once a few needed nips and tucks are performed before the show takes the bow in New York, “Monty” should deliver the goods.

And exactly how full is this “Monty”? The stage cast goes further than their movie counterparts, revealing all in a final, full-frontal flash — though, to be fair, some tricky stagecraft obscures the view. Even so, that certainly rates as one gimmick no movie-to-stage adaptation has yet attempted.

If nothing else, the new “Full Monty” may go down in history as the first musical in which the players deliberately lost their shirts.

A bad wind is already blowing.

Director Wolfgang Petersen’s computer graphics-augmented take on Sebastian Junger’s bestselling account isn’t facing an easy cruise. Petersen’s film — call it “Das Fishing Boot” — will be racing headlong into Mel Gibson’s latest opus, “The Patriot,” a Revolutionary War flag-waver that opened yesterday.

Daily Variety foresaw bloody, mano-a-mano combat: “Both films have weak spots. With ‘Storm,’ it’s clearly Clooney, who is no Mel Gibson at the B.O.” Clooney tacitly admitted as much last week when, in a shrewd bit of expectations-spinning, he confessed to CNN’s “Showbiz Today”: “We’ll get beat by ‘Patriot’ the first week. It’s Mel Gibson, you know, I mean - that’s OK. It’s also supposed to be a good film. But I think we’ll stick around awhile. We’ve got good legs.”

Before you shout “Man overboard!” consider the fact that a mere six years ago, the affable Clooney was nothing but a 33-year-old journeyman TV actor, the kind of guy who lived for pilot season, when the casting couch fills with handsome hunks for all those cop/doc/lawyer shows that the networks churn out every season.

After a decade of bouncing from show to show (“Roseanne,” “The Facts of Life,” “Sisters”) Clooney finally got lucky. Forced to decide between a couple of projects, he picked “ER”; the doctor thing proved an immediate hit, and Clooney got to play sexy Ben Casey opposite Anthony Edwards’ stolid Dr. Kildare. Rosemary’s nephew became a TV star.

Meanwhile, the Hollywood stud farm was facing a thoroughbred shortage. Once-invincible international action stars like Arnold and Sly were beginning to run out of steam. Established brands like Harrison Ford and Michael Douglas were pushing 50 — and beyond. A number of actors in their 40s who were expected to take their place — Jeff Bridges, Dennis Quaid — had peaked too soon; suffering one flop too many, they’d been barred from the A list. And though a new generation of romantic boy-men like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt were coming into their own, they still hadn’t quite graduated from callow-youth parts to full-fledged grownup characters. That left just a handful of all-purpose, bona-fide stars — Gibson, Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Kevin Costner (and to a lesser extent Nicolas Cage and Denzel Washington) — shouldering the weight. This elite group could hardly meet the demand for seasoned actors with proven box-office track records ready and willing to take on mature roles.

So when the pinup magazines took a shine to that new doc on “ER,” Hollywood was only too happy to take a flyer, hoping to groom him into a genuine film star. Unwilling to follow in the footsteps of David Caruso — who traded one season on “NYPD Blue” for belly-up failure in movies like “Kiss of Death” and “Jade” and wound up as a “South Park” punch line — Clooney kept his day job while testing the movie waters during his TV hiatuses. His first foray, director Robert Rodriguez’s vampire slash-fest “From Dusk to Dawn,” was a minor hit, grossing $26 million for Miramax’s low-rent Dimension label.

But when Clooney moved into mainstream romantic comedy opposite Michelle Pfeiffer in “One Fine Day,” the results weren’t promising. The movie opened to just $6.2 million and managed a final gross of only $46 million.

Still, Hollywood, and, in particular, Warner Bros., which produced “ER,” was undaunted. Desperate to find a star to stretch the latex in its fourth Batman film, “Batman & Robin” (1997) (the series had already used up Michael Keaton in the first two installments, and a petulant Val Kilmer in the third), the studio turned to Clooney. “Batman & Robin” turned out to be the least successful installment, all but dooming the franchise with a $107 million gross, a steep decline from “Forever’s” $184 million. Still, Clooney (whose mug was obscured for half the movie anyway) emerged unscathed. “The studio was just grateful that he was willing to wear that silly rubber suit,” recalls one Warner veteran, “and that he went out and did his best to sell the picture.”

Since then Clooney, who left “ER” for full-time film work last year, has settled into a remarkably consistent, second-tier stardom. The true A-list test is one’s ability to lure opening weekend audiences, and Clooney’s stats speak for themselves: His ’97 DreamWorks thriller, “The Peacemaker,” opened to $12.3 million; in ’98, director Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight” — though a big hit with the critics — debuted to $12 million. And last summer, David O. Russell’s edgy “Three Kings” scored a $15.8 million weekend. One difficulty Clooney faces: His “ER”-friendly fan base is solidly female. But unlike rabid young males, older women don’t automatically show up in droves for opening weekends — and testosterone-heavy projects like “Three Kings” don’t appeal to them in the first place. With the exception of “Batman & Robin,” in which the franchise was the true star, Clooney has never been able to crack a $20 million opening. The pervading wisdom is that he can’t “open” a film.

“The Perfect Storm” should change that — though, again, Warner is pushing concept (little boat, big sea) over actors in its marketing campaign. “Clooney’s not a movie star,” insists one producer. “He’s certainly cute. And I did like him in “Out of Sight,” but Soderbergh is a genius with actors. It’s telling that Clooney was weak in a romantic comedy like ‘One Fine Day,’ where the charisma should show. He’ll get credit if ‘Perfect Storm’ does well — and I think it will — but he won’t deserve the credit, any more than Jeff Goldblum or Richard Attenborough deserved the credit for the success of ‘Jurassic Park.’ It’s the waves, stupid.”

Another observer of Clooney’s career disagrees, arguing, “He’s a star. When he’s on the set, he’s the man and he gets what he wants. How famous do you need to be? He gets to headline pictures, but he doesn’t have to shoulder all the weight a Mel Gibson must carry.”

Of course, Mel gets paid to tote that load. Gibson now commands as much as $25 million per film. Here’s the real secret behind Clooney’s ascension: He’s a cheap date, at least by Hollywood standards. Though his asking price is $10 million, the actor knows when to cut a deal: He agreed to take $5 million on “Three Kings”; successfully underbid Cage to win “Perfect Storm” for an $8 million salary; and cut his fee even further to appear in the Coen brothers’ upcoming Depression-era comedy, “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?”

In early conversations about his next project, Warner’s all-star remake of the Rat Pack classic “Ocean’s Eleven,” he immediately offered to work wholesale, helping the studio to inform the film’s other prospective stars — Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis — that they would have to take a pay cut too. “‘Ocean’s Eleven’ is a good move for him,” observes the producer. “Ensembles are one way an actor can conceal his real box office value. He’ll rise with the tide of Julia and Brad and everyone else in that movie.”

So far, Clooney’s easygoing appeal, bolstered by his pragmatic business dealings, has served him well. This year, he made his first appearance on Premiere magazine’s annual Power List, albeit in 82nd place. And he’s escaped the fate of TV personalities like Tom Selleck and Ted Danson, who were never able to find a foothold as movie stars and slipped off the big screen.

Now all he has to do is cross his fingers and hope that if “The Perfect Storm” doesn’t perform up to expectations, he won’t go down with the ship.