When presenting yourself at the box office in the coming months, you probably won’t need to specify which “Nine” film you want to see. It should be pretty obvious.

If you have a dyed-black mop of hair, are spilling out of vinyl pants, and the backpack or purse you’re toting is shaped like something (eg: coffin, cat or cartoon character), you’ll probably want two tickets to 9.

It’s a computer-animated tale of nine rag dolls who are brought to life by a kindly scientist. Set in a post-apocalyptic futuristic wasteland that is ever-so-steampunky, the nine dolls must fight against hideous killer robots while rocking out to the epic emo-prog of Coheed & Cambria. It began as a lauded short by Shane Acker, which caught the eye of (guess who?) Tim Burton. The maestro of moodiness is co-executive producer alongside Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov (who is surely Burton’s Kazakh non-union equivalent).

The gloomy kids are sure to gravitate to its raggedy underdog story, glowing green horrors and the aforementioned emo score. It doesn’t hurt that the voice cast is led by Elijah ‘Frodo’ Wood, with John C Reilly, Jennifer Connelly and freaky film icons Martin Landau, Christopher Plummer and Crispin Glover.

No doubt these same kids would emit mock-gagging noises and roll their eyes wildly if the ticket-seller accidentally gave them tickets to Nine. This is because they have been confused with mainstream mums between 25 and 65 years old.

Chicago director Rob Marshall has revived the 1982 Tony Award-winning musical of the same name, which was inspired by Fellini’s 8 ½. It might be exactly one half better than the revered film. Or, since 8 ½ referred to the amount of films Fellini had directed (the half is a co-director credit), maybe it’s worth exactly one half of his films.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays the struggling director. I can’t quite remember him breaking into song in My Left Foot or There Will Be Blood, but rest assured he’s the only man marring this girl’s night out. The character is surrounded by women during a mid-life crisis, played by Marion Cotillard (wife), Penelope Cruz (mistress), Nicole Kidman (muse), Sophia Loren (mother), Judi Dench (confidant), Kate Hudson (fashion journalist) and some whore playing some whore (actually, it’s Fergie).

There probably won’t be much crossover between these groups, so it’ll be easy to distinguish which film they’re gushing about by checking whether they’re cradling a Cosmo or absinthe. If you see a rum and coke, they’re probably getting excited by the forthcoming Peter Jackson-presented anti-racism sci-fi fable District 9 and you missed the start of the conversation.