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LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) -- No wizards named Harry, no lords chasing rings, no hunters of national treasures, no nights at a museum. Not even Bond is showing up.

This year's holiday movie schedule is relatively sequel-free, save for a teen-vampire flick and few high-pitched chipmunks. And remakes are just as scarce, with only Scrooge and Sherlock Holmes on the agenda.

Yes, for the 2009 holiday season, Hollywood will be left to its own devices to get by -- and it could end up being one of the industry's biggest crapshoots ever.

"There really aren't those guaranteed blockbusters," said Brandon Gray, president of BoxOfficeMojo.com. "The season is more interesting because you don't have those big franchise movies."

The closest thing to a "guaranteed" blockbuster sequel this year is "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," and that guarantee is somewhat muted.

The original "Twilight" teenage vampire film debuted last November and did well, but not spectacularly well enough to prop up an entire season of movie going. The film, whose main audience is teenage girls, took in $383.7 million worldwide.

That puts it at 121st on the all-time list -- well behind all six "Harry Potter" movies and countless other holiday entries. Independent studio Summit Entertainment made the film for a reportedly relatively paltry sum of $37 million, bringing a ten-fold return in receipts.

But Gray says it may be tough for "New Moon" to beat "Twilight's" numbers because the film series, based on Stephenie Meyer's popular books, was already well-known prior to the first film.

"The amount of hype was pretty high for the first movie," Gray said.

Miniature summer

The holiday movie season is sort of a miniature version of the industry's lucrative summer season, says Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office analysis for Hollywood.com. Dergarabedian says the amount of business that Hollywood gets from the holiday season is proportionally equivalent of summer -- both rely largely on students with a lot of free time on their hands.

There's roughly $4 billion in box-office receipts to be gleaned from 16 weeks of summer films, or about 40% of the industry's full-year take. The holiday season is a little less than half that long and comprises about 18% of the overall receipts, or close to $2 billion.

"Week-for-week, dollar-for-dollar, it's as important as the summer season," Dergarabedian said.

Whether this holiday season can live up to that notion remains to be seen.

One of the big gambles this year is on "Avatar," the first feature film directed by James Cameron since 1997's "Titanic." Still the all-time box-office champ, "Titanic" made $600 million in the U.S. and $1.8 billion worldwide.

"Avatar" cost a reported $230 million and took four years to make. It's the story of a band of humans that visits a distant planet and finds itself at odds with the natives over the discovery of rare gems on the planet. The protagonist is a paraplegic war veteran transformed into one of the natives via a top-secret process -- and a little Hollywood magic. He's assigned to infiltrate the enemy, but he ends up defending them.

Distributor Twentieth-Century Fox no doubt is looking for that magic to flow the way it did for "Titanic," its co-venture with Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures unit. (Twentieth-Century Fox, like MarketWatch, publisher of this report, is a unit of News Corp. )

But the studio remains confident its gamble will pay off. As a company spokesman put it: "We know it'll be big -- the question is how big."

Breaking new ground

One big draw is expected to be that Cameron tries to break new ground with the film. He uses a new camera system that Fox officials insist will set a new standard for filmmaking.

Plus, the planet's natives are created via a sort of "performance-capture" animation, sort of like what was done with "The Polar Express" and "Beowulf," as well as the Golum character in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. This time, however, the film uses what Fox calls "emotion capture," which aims for a seamless transition between the live-action characters and those that are the product of animation.

"Avatar" is scheduled for release Dec. 18.

An even bigger gamble is Sony Corp.'s "2012," a disaster film that imagines the end of the world in three years, a prophecy emanating from the Mayan calendar. The movie, starring John Cusack, cost a reported $260 million to make and is due out Nov. 13.

The film's release was moved back from July in an effort to take increase box-office potential. Roland Emmerich, director of "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow," also was at the helm of "2012."

While there may be few sequels on tap, the season is chock full of fully animated features, the first of which will debut Friday. "A Christmas Carol," a refashioning of the classic Dickens tale as done by Walt Disney Co. , is one of four widely released films to mark the unofficial start of the holiday season. Starring Jim Carrey in the Scrooge role, "A Christmas Carol" also uses performance-capture animation to illustrate the point.

The other entries on Friday -- all live action -- include two thrillers: "The Box" from Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. studio and "The Fourth Kind" from General Electric Co.'s Universal Pictures unit. There's also "The Men Who Stare at Goats," a comedy from independent Overture Films.

"New Moon" debuts Nov. 20, the Friday before Thanksgiving along with another animated feature, Sony's "Planet 51" and "The Blind Side," a sports drama from Warner.

That following Wednesday, three films hit theaters, "Ninja Assassin," an action film from Warner, "Old Dogs," a family comedy from Disney and "The Road," a thriller from the Weinstein Co.

Second Disney film

Also on that Wednesday will be a limited release of Disney's second animation entry for the season, "The Princess and the Frog." It's rare that Disney, the art form's pioneer, puts out two major animated releases in the same season. But Disney says "Princess" is different from "A Christmas Carol" in that it's all hand-drawn sketches, an art form becoming virtually obsolete in an era now dominated by computer-generated images.

Disney first announced plans for "Princess" at its 2007 annual meeting in New Orleans, the city where the film's story takes place. It was there that John Lasseter, the onetime Pixar chief who now oversees all Disney animation, announced the studio would revisit traditional hand-drawn animation. Along with "Avatar," "Princess" is one of the most anticipated films of the year.

Also in December, Sony will release the thriller "Armored" on Dec. 4, while Lionsgate's drama "Brothers" debuts. "Everybody's Fine," a comedy from Disney's Miramax unit featuring Robert De Niro, also debuts that day.

"Princess and the Frog" is set to go into wide release Dec. 11, and it'll be joined by Sony's romantic comedy, "Did You Hear About the Morgans?" with Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker, and "Invictus," a Clint Eastwood film about South African leader Nelson Mandela.

After "Avatar's" Dec. 18 release, Christmas Day premieres include the only other sequel on tap, Fox's animated "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel." Also debuting is Universal's romantic comedy, "It's Complicated," featuring Meryl Streep and this year's co-hosts of the Oscar ceremony, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.

Other releases include "Sherlock Holmes" from Warner Bros., with Robert Downey Jr. in the title role, and two Paramount films that are expanding to wider audiences: "Up in the Air" with George Clooney and "The Lovely Bones," from "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson.

Oscar bait

The season will have its share of Oscar bait but the campaigning is sure to be heavier this year, since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has expanded its best-picture nominee list from five to 10 films.

Dergarabedian says that list may include a few films from earlier in the year, including such popular entries as "Star Trek" and "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince."

He adds that films like "Up in the Air" and Lionsgate's "Precious" are expected to capture awards attention. The surest sign a film is considered a contender is when a studio does a "platform release," getting a film in a handful of theaters at first and on to more screens as the weeks wear on.

That goes for animated films, too, which have their own Oscar category. "Princess and the Frog" may be one, but another is the fifth animated film to be released, "The Fantastic Mr. Fox," from, well, Fox, Dergarabedian says. Featuring the voices of Clooney and Cate Blanchett, "Mr. Fox" comes out in limited release Nov. 13 and expands the following weekend.

BoxOfficeMojo's Gray says that even though Hollywood is taking a gamble this year by not releasing any tried-and-true franchises, a season of original material may be needed to prime the pump.

"Relying on movies that aren't franchises or aren't sequels is pretty nice for the long term," Gray said. "If they don't come up with some new ideas, they won't have franchises or sequels for the future."