Studio sources are attempting to explain away the bad tracking by saying that family films never score particularly well in advance audience surveys, but there’s something fundamentally wrong in the numbers that have been described to me. Un-Aided Awareness, an excellent measure of buzz and anticipation, is stronger for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (Disney), at 9 percent, than it is for Speed Racer (8 percent), and the Narnia sequel won’t hit theatres until May 16.

The bad news doesn’t stop there. Caspian out-tracks the Emile Hirsch-Christina Ricci racing flick in the Definite Interest column 44 percent to 32 percent, and in the all-important First Choice column 17 percent to 4 percent. Yes, there are some kids unrepresented in the tracking, but that's as true for Prince Caspian as it is for Racer. This has all of the makings of a disastrous roll-over car wreck.

One exec from a competing studio told me that Warner Bros. will be lucky to steer Speed Racer to $35 million on opening weekend. The Narnia tracking, on the other hand, suggests that it will have no problem opening above the 2005 original’s $65.5 million on the following Friday. Even if word-of-mouth for Speed Racer is positive, there likely won’t be time for it to get any traction with family audiences before being swamped by Prince Caspian. That means that the likely ceiling for the Wachowski brainchild is a disappointing $75 million-$80 million.