The first big release of the lucrative summer moviegoing season will actually come out in the final four hours of the spring. Iron Man, a superhero movie starring Robert Downey Jr., opened in more than 2,000 theaters last Thursday. That may lower the comic-book action picture’s weekend gross just a tad, but it is still looked likely to ring up an impressive $70 million or more Friday through Sunday. This is the season when the studios are anxious to manage overly exuberant expectations for their big summer releases. Yet executives at Paramount Pictures, which is distributing the Marvel-produced movie, say Iron Man is all but guaranteed to open with more than $60 million over its first weekend.

Pre-release buzz for Iron Man is so strong that only one studio has scheduled a rival wide release for this weekend, when Sony will hope its Patrick Dempsey romantic comedy “Made of Honor” can attract a few women. So Paramount and Marvel have the weekend to themselves. Iron Man totes perhaps $150 million in production costs and a $75 million tab for prints and advertising (P&A). Marvel paid for the production, its first wholly financed project, while Paramount put up all of the P&A, which it will recoup along with an unspecified distribution fee.