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No one remembered their name.

Kim Hollis: Fame, the 2009 update of the 1980 film (and 1982 television series), opened to only $10 million. Why do you think this failed to entice audiences the way that several other recent musical/dance films have?

Josh Spiegel: When your biggest star is Frasier Crane, things are not going well. Moreover, the lack of any real breakout stars in the young cast didn't help. Also, unlike movies such as Step Up, Fame is based on a film that few teenagers have seen, and a TV series even fewer are even aware of. The idea wasn't bad, but the actual movie just seemed flat, uninvolving, and uninspired. Every once in a while, the teenagers of America are discerning in their cinematic tastes.

Jim Van Nest: Bah...the lack of star power didn't hurt Fame. The biggest star of the original was Debbie Allen and I'm not sure it wasn't Fame that made her a star. I think the problem is that no one really cared. The ads didn't attract the people who remember the original movie and series fondly and they did nothing to set the movie apart from any other teenage dancy type flick (like the aforementioned Step Up). The Step Up type movies let you know what you're getting: almost no actual plot and a lot of cool moves. And if they can throw in one move in the trailer that you're never seen before, they're golden. Fame looked like it would be too much story, too little new hotness.

Max Braden: I agree, it's probably due to star power. And getting even further away from the power of a named star, Fame looked like an ensemble story rather than a single plotline that an audience could latch on to.

Reagen Sulewski: For the ads or the cast to have attracted people, they'd have to have seen them. There's no evidence I can see that they even tried to market this one heavily, although I admittedly don't watch any of the performing reality shows. But even then, the strength of those shows is that you get to meet characters over weeks at a time, and condensing that into 90 minutes just doesn't have the same appeal to that audience anymore.





David Mumpower: Needs more yard-stomping.

Sean Collier: Needs more Efron.

Kim Hollis: Everything's better with a little Efron.

That's one big Pandorum's Box.

Kim Hollis: Something called Pandorum, starring zombie Dennis Quaid and Twilight bad boy Cam Gigandet, opened to $4.4 million with a dismal per location average of $1,759. What went wrong here?

Tony Kollath: Not that Quaid would have been any kind of a draw for a project like this, but I had no idea he was in the movie until I looked up the listing on IMDb a week before it opened.

Pete Kilmer: While I intend on seeing this movie myself, it doesn't scream out must-see.

Josh Spiegel: Haven't we seen this movie before? Doesn't it all just seem like Pandorum has been made 100 times before? Repetition aside, the marketing was light, and I was more surprised to find out that Dennis Quaid wasn't the lead here, let alone that he was in the film. Just in general, the new movies this weekend didn't seem to intrigue anyone, based on topic, actors, and marketing. Failure on every end.

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