UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — In the perfect little town of Paradise, Ohio, a pretty-faced new kid has a crush on the sweet blonde who is showing him around. By the way, the kid is also a space alien, on the run from some other aliens who are anything but pretty.

After two years in the throes of a financial restructuring, Steven Spielberg and his DreamWorks Studios are back with some typically Spielbergian stuff. And they are starting the next round with the sort of fanciful, scary, sometimes heartwarming movies they know best — and their new distribution ally, Walt Disney Studios, needs most.

Success for DreamWorks might quickly return Disney to its former status as a “full service” studio offering a wide range of action movies and dramas, after it had focused for years on animation and family fare that paid the bills but kept the company out of the Hollywood mainstream.

It would also vindicate both a new film management team, and the decision by the Disney chief executive, Robert A. Iger, to dismantle the company’s Miramax art film unit.

DreamWorks Studios is completely separate from DreamWorks Animation, a publicly traded animation company whose films are still distributed by Paramount Pictures.

But DreamWorks is not starting with challenging films like its Oscar winner “American Beauty” or its hit musical “Dreamgirls.” Instead, it plans to produce one or two outsize blockbuster-style movies each year, and four or five smaller films that stick with Hollywood’s more reliable genres.

The caution is understandable. Founded in 1994 by Mr. Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, the original DreamWorks SKG took about three years to release its first movie.

It was an international thriller called “The Peacemaker” with George Clooney, who had soft credentials as an action star. It fell flat, embarrassing the new studio, with just $69 million in worldwide ticket sales.

This time, there are no long shots.

The inaugural film from the revamped DreamWorks, “I Am Number Four,” with those hormonal teenagers and nasty aliens — and a heavy “Twilight” element — is set for release on Disney’s Touchstone banner on Feb. 18. Mr. Spielberg is not expected to take a credit on the film, remaining in his executive role. But neither is he taking chances with the first in a string of movies that will inevitably have investors, business allies and the audience watching for his trademark screen magic.

“There’s a lot of him in there,” said Marti Noxon, who is among the writers of “I Am Number Four,” and is perhaps best known for her work on the television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” More than once, said Ms. Noxon, she found herself laboring with Mr. Spielberg in a conference room in his adobe-style complex on the Universal Studios lot here in an effort to get the teenagers and aliens just right.

DreamWorks — now owned by Mr. Spielberg and Stacey Snider, with financial backing from Reliance Big Entertainment of India and distribution via Disney — carefully picked the release date. It is the kind of winter slot that has been good to popcorn fare like “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” which generated over $183 million at the global box office last year, and “Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief,” which took in $226.4 million in February.

The director of “I Am Number Four,” D. J. Caruso, gave DreamWorks a pair of PG-13 hits, “Disturbia” and “Eagle Eye,” during its unhappy tenure as a partner of Paramount Pictures. The producer is Michael Bay, who mixed teenagers and space creatures for DreamWorks and Paramount in the blockbuster “Transformers” series. In an e-mail, Mr. Bay said he brought the project to Mr. Spielberg, whom he described as a “mentor and friend.”

That “I Am Number Four” should be first up from the new DreamWorks in many ways owes more to the accidents of moviemaking than any grand design.

After finally securing about $850 million in financing from various sources about 14 months ago, company executives approved a half-dozen films, all of which were in production this year, according to Ms. Snider, who plays down the drama in starting anew.

“DreamWorks has been doing this for 16 years, and I’ve been with Steven for four and a half years,” she said.

“He’s made movies for every studio in town,” Ms. Snider added. “But if it feels like a debut, I guess that’s good.”

“Cowboys & Aliens,” the most expensive film on the new DreamWorks slate, will cost $100 million or more, but it is a co-production with Universal Pictures, which will release it next July. Directed by Jon Favreau, with Harrison Ford in a lead role, it is an action-fantasy about a fight among cowboys, Indians and aliens.

A remake of “Fright Night,” which is directed by Craig Gillespie (whose credits include “Mr. Woodcock”) and written by Ms. Noxon, is also on the list. It puts teenagers and vampires in a 3-D horror romp, and is set for release by Disney in August.

Other films for Disney in the next year include “Real Steel,” which is directed by Shawn Levy (“Night at the Museum”) and pits robot against robot in a father-and-son boxing story set in the near future; “The Help,” which is directed by an untested director, Tate Taylor, and is based on a popular novel about white Southern women and their black domestic workers in the 1960s; and “War Horse,” which is directed by Mr. Spielberg and adapted from a book and play about the friendship between a boy and his horse during World War I.

Distributing some of these pictures will be tricky — Disney just found out how difficult a horse movie is to sell with its own underperforming “Secretariat” — but Disney is bubbly about its budding relationship with DreamWorks.

“Releasing the DreamWorks films allows us to have greater leverage in the market,” said Rich Ross, chairman of Walt Disney Studios. He added, “When you team with DreamWorks, you don’t just add tonnage, you add great filmmakers and tremendously experienced executives.” (It doesn’t hurt that Mr. Ross and Ms. Snider have been friends since attending the University of Pennsylvania together.)

“I Am Number Four,” which fits squarely in the genre category, is based on a young adult novel ostensibly written by Pittacus Lore, a pseudonym for Jobie Hughes and James Frey. Mr. Frey is best known as the author of “A Million Little Pieces,” a memoir about his life and drug use, elements of which were later discredited as fiction.

In the film version, Alex Pettyfer plays one among a group of young aliens who are hiding on Earth from an another alien race who must hunt and kill them in sequence. Mr. Pettyfer’s character is Number Four, and Numbers One through Three are dead.

(DreamWorks is grooming Mr. Pettyfer, a 20-year-old who made his feature film debut four years ago in “Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker,” as the next Shia LaBeouf, a slightly older star it has featured in several films, including the “Transformers” series. Plans now call for Mr. Pettyfer to star in a biographical film for the studio, to be produced by himself and John Palermo, about the Formula One racing driver James Hunt.)

Speaking by telephone, Mr. Caruso said he had been developing some planned projects for Paramount last year, when the DreamWorks crew approached him with a script that was begun when the original juvenile novel for “I Am Number Four” was still in manuscript form.

“This was an incredibly quick process,” Mr. Caruso said of the rush to get his film in motion once DreamWorks had its financing in place.

Much of the movie was shot in and around Vandergrift, Pa., where Mr. Caruso could take advantage of Pennsylvania film production incentives, as well as a utopian small-town setting that was designed originally by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, who helped lay out Central Park.

The film borrows a bit from Mr. Spielberg, acknowledged Mr. Caruso, particularly when the young, Earth-bound alien shares his luminous power with a special friend, named Sarah.

“There’s a beautiful moment, like ‘E.T.’ and ‘Close Encounters,’ ” he said.

If Mr. Spielberg offered light, Mr. Caruso added, Mr. Bay brought some heat.

“Number Six is a sexy, kick-ass girl, so there’s definitely a little bit of Michael Bay in there.”

So film Number One has something for everyone. “It’s got adult sort of action that can cross over to the family,” Mr. Caruso said.

“I wanted to do something my kids can see.”