`LOST WORLD' FINDS BOX-OFFICE GOLD.

The ground-shaking thud of giant footsteps approaching. The awful, primal scream of a predator announcing its presence.

The reverberations are being heard throughout the film industry, and it's not just the sound of a Tyrannosaurus rex approaching in Universal's blockbuster ``The Lost World: Jurassic Park.''

It's the sound of changed expectations and new approaches to film distribution in the wake of the dinosaur movie's record-smashing first-weekend box-office performance.

``The Lost World'' is setting precedents not just because of the dollars it took in, but because of the way the studio maximized the potential for it to go through the roof, flooding the market with more than 5,000 prints and booking it at an unprecedented 3,281 theaters, say industry analysts.

``There's been a growing trend in the business to front-load a film's release to maximize the opening weekend,'' said Jeff Blake, distribution president for Sony Pictures Releasing. ``What's different here, and what's going to influence other studios, is their strategy of supplying so many prints to the top-grossing multiplexes in the big cities so that in some cases they're able to start another screening of the movie every half-hour.''

At the Cineplex Odeon Universal Studios 18-plex, for example, ``The Lost World'' occupied eight screens over the Memorial Day weekend, with a new show starting every half-hour between 8 a.m. and 2 a.m.

The results were ``astronomical,'' said Brian Fuson, box-office analyst for the industry trade paper the Hollywood Reporter. At the 47 Los Angeles-area theaters showing ``The Lost World,'' each theater averaged $78,733 over the four-day weekend, said Fuson, attributing the numbers partly to the number of screens made available when other studios fled from the competition. ``Movies can do really well in L.A., but I've never seen anything come close to this.''

The next-best performance over a four-day weekend was achieved by Paramount's ``Mission: Impossible,'' which, not coincidentally, also had the benefit of more than 5,000 prints in the marketplace at once. The Tom Cruise vehicle averaged $59,620 per screen on L.A. theaters during its opening weekend, Fuson said.

Sony's Blake said the studio recently contributed to the trend toward ever-wider releases when it opened ``The Fifth Element'' in May with a huge 3,300 prints.

The new record set by ``The Lost World'' isn't likely to be broken anytime soon - particularly not this summer, say observers. Part of the reason is that the Spielberg picture had a huge advantage in opening at the start of the summer movie season, when more screens were available.

``For the rest of the summer, all the other major event films, including `The Lost World,' are going to try to hold on to their screens,'' said Fuson. ``That's going to limit what the other openers can do.''

Analysts also say that, as usual, studios will decide on a case-by-case basis how many prints and screens a movie's anticipated audience is likely to support.

``The studios are all strong judges of what's going to work for their product. This is a case where Universal anticipated the demand and did a very effective job of meeting it, but I don't think you'll see that again unless there's a perception of a similar demand,'' said Roy Salter, an analyst at Houlihan, Lokey, Howard & Zukin.

``You still have to be a little cautious,'' said Blake. ``There are still pictures like `Jerry Maguire' where the real profits are going to come from word of mouth, and you don't want to spread those movies too thin at the beginning.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Boxes

Box: (1) Something survived in

JURASSIC PARK

(2) The weekend's top 10