No one in Hollywood doubts that Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow, a disaster and survival drama, will take a big opening. The question is, will it will dislodge Shrek 2 from the top?

Shrek 2, the amazingly resilient story of the green ogre and his new bride, has amassed about $150 million in a week in North America since it opened on May 19; $108 million of that gross was earned over the weekend. Many box-office experts, including Gitesh Pandya of box-officeguru.com, expect it to earn about $70 million in its second weekend.

One of the summer's biggest attractions, Troy, had Brad Pitt and a $180 million budget that commanded an array of special effects. Another big summer release, Van Helsing had a $130 million budget and the charismatic Hugh Jackman, who has been hailed as the new Harrison Ford of adventure movies.

But The Day After Tomorrow will have to depend purely on its craft and special effects to earn big dollars.

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The film, which cost $125 million, opens in more than 3,000 theatres on Friday.

For Emmerich, the film is a serious effort to regain his reputation for telling tall stories filled with awe-inspiring spectacles. After all, he is the man who set a high mark for such films about eight years ago with Independence Day. The new movie has a number of seasoned actors like Dennis Quaid and the promising Jake Gyllenhaal, but these are not names that open a film big.

Following Independence Day, Emmerich, who began his movie career in his native Germany before moving to Hollywood over 12 years ago, made Godzilla, perceived by many as a failure. But the 1998 film was a failure only because it had raised huge expectations. It ended up with a $380 million worldwide gross and brought in a decent profit.

But The Patriot, in which Emmerich opted for a historic drama and signed Mel Gibson in the lead, wasn't a smash hit. It grossed about $200 million worldwide four years ago.

The new film, which shows New York City caught in a superstorm triggered by a catastrophic shift in the earth's climate, has become controversial for something that Emmerich had perhaps not expected. Environmentalists, including former vice-president Al Gore, have started using it to bash the present government's relaxed policy on environmental pollution and global warming.

Emmerich, who has been extensively promoting the film, is also being asked repeatedly if he thought Americans, particularly New Yorkers, would want to watch the film in which Manhattan's tall buildings and the Statue of Liberty are caught in the deadly storm. He says people will understand the terror the movie deals with has nothing to do with political terrorism. New York is not the only city in the film, he could add, that is caught in the storm that is ripping various parts of the world apart.

The movie could make Jake Gyllenhaal, seen in also-ran films like Moonlight Sonata, an international star. He plays a student trapped in New York when the superstorm invades the city. Quaid plays his father. A climate scientist, he tries to reach New York from Washington in the middle of the storm to rescue his son who is huddled in a library with a group of survivors.

Gyllenhaal, whose half-a-dozen released films comprise small-budget projects, notably The Good Girl, experienced for the first time the thrill of working in a big-budget film with its concomitant demands. The shooting stretched for weeks unlike the quickie indies he had been used to.

One of the more respected of the younger lot of actors, Gyllenhaal, who is in his early 20s, says he was primarily drawn to the film because of its environmental message.