Jump aboard as we launch into a new year of movies (no lifeboats required).

A year ago, we concluded our overview of Calendar’s annual Sneaks with the good news that “Private Parts,” starring New York shock jock Howard Stern in the filmed adaptation of his autobiography, would not be ready for release in 1996. Sorry to report, we can’t put it off any longer. Paramount, flush with the success of “Beavis and Butt-head Do America,” assures us that we’ll be able to see Stern’s “Private Parts” before spring.

But let’s not sweat the small stuff. This is the year of big in Hollywood. Big fantasies, big adventures, big thrillers, big budgets. The adage “It takes money to make money” has never been embraced as wholeheartedly as it is being embraced now. As we approach the millennium, the $80-million movie is becoming routine, and critics aren’t kidding when they call the $34-million “The English Patient” an “art-house” film.

The ’97 schedule is jam-packed with effects-laden goliaths. There will be outer-space fantasies, undersea adventures, undersea adventures with outer-space creatures, and more natural disasters than you can shake a map of California at. A volcano will erupt in the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles. More dinosaurs will hatch at Jurassic Park. There will be floods and forest fires, viruses and aliens, and aliens who think we’re viruses. And the same old iceberg will be lurking when the Titanic takes another crack at crossing the Atlantic.

The major studios, having to share their resources with their conglomerate siblings, aren’t making movies anymore, they’re building modular cities in which the picture serves as the central plaza, surrounded by video, music, souvenir and book stores. Plus the occasional fast-food franchise. If you’re even thinking of ignoring such summer attractions as “Batman and Robin,” “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” and “George of the Jungle,” Taco Bell, Burger King and McDonald’s won’t let you.

Still, January is National Optimism Among Moviegoers Month. The theaters are flush with quality year-end movies, Hollywood is claiming record prosperity at the box office, trophies are being prepared for a daisy chain of awards shows, and though we’ve been disappointed in the past, we can’t say this year will be as bad as the last.

One thing is certain. The high-stakes summer season, with its overload of big-budget popcorn pictures, is going to leave some distributors’ noses bloodied. Even with everyone trying to get out of each other’s way, that is, with everyone trying to get out of the way of Steven Spielberg’s “The Lost World,” there won’t be money enough to go around.

The Big Three for summer ’97 figure to be “The Lost World,” which opens May 23, and two movies going head to head on June 20: Walt Disney’s animated musical “Hercules” and Warner Bros.’ “Batman and Robin.” All three films are going to be blockbusters--in fact, they could team up as the first trio of $200-million movies from one year--but look what else is in store for those crowds who lined up last summer for “Twister” and “Independence Day.”

James Cameron, who directed the “Terminator” movies, knows a little something about epic special-effects storytelling, and we anticipate that his reenactment of the voyage of the “Titanic” is going to have us all singing “Nearer My God to Thee.” Robert Zemeckis, in his first film since “Forrest Gump,” will take us to the other end of the IQ scale with “Contact,” starring Jodie Foster as a brainy astronomer who catches signals from outer space. Wolfgang Petersen (“In the Line of Fire”) takes on another White House thriller, “Air Force One,” with Harrison “Summer Money” Ford in the lead.

Meanwhile, 20th Century Fox is devoting most of its summer to sequels, headed by Jan De Bont’s “Speed 2: Cruise Control.” The others--”Home Alone 3,” with a new kid in for Macaulay Culkin, and “Alien Resurrection,” the third rematch of Sigourney Weaver and the Alien--may have a tougher time drawing a crowd. Sony executives must also have high hopes for Barry Sonnenfeld’s “Men in Black,” a science-fiction comedy starring Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith as intergalactic immigration officers, and Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers,” about a manned mission to eradicate a race of giant alien insects.

As “Twister” and “Independence Day” demonstrated last summer, you may not need big stars to generate big grosses, and this summer, there won’t be that many. Besides Harrison Ford and Foster, Mel Gibson will be along to help revive Julia Roberts’ sagging career in “Conspiracy Theory,” an offbeat romantic comedy about a cabby and a federal prosecutor. Jim Carrey, who stumbled last time out with “The Cable Guy,” plays the title character in “The Truman Show,” about a man who discovers his entire life has been a television show. Nicolas Cage, who held his own with Sean Connery in last summer’s hit “The Rock,” will team up this time with John Travolta for a John Woo action film, “Face Off.” And Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves will be seen in Taylor Hackford’s “Devil’s Advocate” as attorneys working for a law firm that may have literally gone to hell.

Overall, there are a lot of double-dip movies--sequels, remakes and adaptations of TV shows--on the schedule. There are sequels to “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,” “Mortal Kombat,” “Free Willy” (No. 3), “National Lampoon’s Vacation” (No. 4) and James Bond (No. 18). Remakes of “Great Expectations,” “That Darn Cat” and “Doctor Dolittle.” And film versions of “McHale’s Navy,” “Leave It to Beaver” and “The Saint.”

When it comes to going back to the well for family entertainment, no one is being more audacious than George Lucas and Fox, who are reissuing technically enhanced versions of the three films that make up the “Star Wars” trilogy. They were great movies, but they also launched a decade of bad imitations and false expectations, not to mention the cult of merchandising, and it’s grim to think we could be in for another cycle.

But, we were being optimistic. The fun of reading through Sneaks is finding that combination of directors, stars and stories that look promising. Look, Francis Ford Coppola is slumming again, directing a John Grisham adaptation, “The Rainmaker.” But Coppola slums better than most directors peak. Sidney Lumet, “Mr. Reliable” when he’s making gritty dramas about New York justice, has something coming called “Night Falls on Manhattan,” about a cop (Andy Garcia) whose idealism faces the pressures of pragmatism from the political system. Costa-Gavras has made a few missteps, but “Mad City,” starring Dustin Hoffman and John Travolta as a TV reporter and a security guard caught up in a national incident, sounds right up his alley.

There are films on the schedule from Oliver Stone and Warren Beatty, whose bright minds don’t always produce clear thoughts, but whose films are always events. Al Pacino and Johnny Depp seem ideal casting for Mike Newell’s gangland drama, “Donnie Brasco.” And Neil Jordan, whose small films are always better than his big ones, downsizes from “Michael Collins” to the Irish psychological drama “Butcher Boy.”

Directing himself this time, Clint Eastwood again gets in the line of fire, in “Absolute Power,” playing a career thief caught up in some White House intrigue involving President Gene Hackman. Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt, as a New York cop and an Irish rebel, play cat and mouse in Alan J. Pakula’s “The Devil’s Own.” And one of the year’s most interesting casting packages has Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jennifer Jason Leigh playing sisters brought together by an inheritance in Jocelyn Moorhouse’s “A Thousand Acres.”

If the schedule seems overweighed with science-fiction, action films and disaster movies, check out the comedies. More than 70 of them. Besides “The Truman Show,” Jim Carrey stars in “Liar, Liar,” directed by his “Ace Ventura” guide, Tom Shadyac. Old friends and “Comic Relief” partners Billy Crystal and Robin Williams get together in a film for the first time in Ivan Reitman’s “Fathers’ Day.” Williams also seems perfectly cast for the remake of “The Absent-Minded Professor.”

James L. Brooks is a master at finding humor in ordinary situations, and “Old Friends,” with Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt and Greg Kinnear as strangers brought together by a dog in New York, sounds pretty . . . ordinary.

Kevin Kline, the best light film comedian we have, stars in Frank Oz’s “In and Out,” as a man wrestling with his sexuality on the eve of his wedding. The script is by one of the funniest writers alive, Paul Rudnick, who authors the Libby Gelman-Waxner column in Premiere magazine.

And for those of us addicted to the twisted humor of the Coen brothers, they follow “Fargo” with “The Big Lebowski,” starring Jeff Bridges as a couch potato who, because of mistaken identity, is drawn into a handsome $1-million kidnapping scheme.

While Disney’s “Hercules” and “Little Mermaid” reissue will likely dominate the year’s animation business, there will be other choices. Among them: Warner Bros.’ new animation division’s first feature, “Quest for Camelot,” a retelling of the Arthurian legend, and Fox’s “Anastasia,” made by the Dublin-based animators of Don Bluth (“An American Tail”).

Naturally, expectations will be high for filmmakers who broke through with their last films. “One Night Stand” will be Mike Figgis’ first picture since “Leaving Las Vegas”; David Fincher follows “Seven” with “The Game”; “Trainspotting’s” Danny Boyle goes upbeat with “A Life Less Ordinary,” about angel matchmakers come to Earth; P.J. Hogan goes from “Muriel’s Wedding” to “My Best Friend’s Wedding”; and Ang Lee’s answer to “Sense and Sensibility” is a New England domestic drama titled “Icestorm.”

You’re probably aware of the race between Fox and Universal to be first in theaters with their volcano movies. Universal won, announcing a Feb. 7 date for “Dante’s Peak”; Fox will release “Volcano,” the one set in the Wilshire District, later in the year. And you may have heard that there are two movies coming on Steve Prefontaine, the charismatic Oregon track star who died in a car crash in 1975. Disney hit the tape first on this one: “Prefontaine,” from the makers of “Hoop Dreams,” opens Friday. Warner Bros.’ “Pre,” directed by Robert Towne (“Personal Best”), comes in the fall.

And there are two Tibet movies--neither of which stars Richard Gere. Both films are scheduled for fall release. Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun,” based on the life of the Dalai Lama, is being released by Disney. Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “Seven Years in Tibet” is about a Westerner (Brad Pitt) spiritually transformed by a trip to the Himalayan home of the Dalai Lama.

Finally, here are a few burning questions we’ll have answered this year: Did “Waterworld” finish director Kevin Reynolds? Kevin Costner’s ex-friend attempts a comeback with “187,” a drama about an inner-city schoolteacher (Samuel L. Jackson) who has his attitude made over by a beating from a student.

Did “Waterworld” finish Kevin Costner as an action star? Costner tries it again, directing himself in the futuristic thriller “The Postman.”

Will DreamWorks’ films work? The initial Spielberg-Katzenberg-Geffen releases are due to arrive late in the year. First up is expected to be “The Peacemaker,” an action thriller starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. Also on tap, for Christmas, “Amistad,” Steven Spielberg’s historical drama about a mutiny aboard a Spanish slave ship in 1839.

And (say it isn’t so) will Howard Stern become a star?