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Machine guns shoot out his butt? What kid wouldn't love this?

Kim Hollis: Astro Boy, an animated feature from Summit Entertainment, opened to $6.7 million in 3,014 locations. What do you think about this result?

Josh Spiegel: Astro Boy suffered partly because of how uninterested kids were in the character, partly because of the continued success of Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, and partly because the marketing wasn't terribly engaging for any audience member. I'm not sure what else to say here, as...well, who cares about seeing an Astro Boy movie? There wasn't much call for a film, and no interest in the product.

Sean Collier: Why bother to reinvent kids' properties that no kids are familiar with? Just make a slight variation and call it original. Kids had about as much reason to care about this as they would a Woody Woodpecker movie, so they should be thrilled with $6.7 million. (Incidentally, please tell me someone has already greenlit a Woody Woodpecker movie.)

Jim Van Nest: I generally use my kids as a barometer for how a kids flick will do and there was no interest in my house for Astro Boy. The "I have machine guns in my butt?" line got chuckles at home, but there was nothing in the way of a demand to see this one. By way of comparison, I was bombarded with requests for Cloudy With a Chance For Meatballs every time the commercial ran. And on Nick...that was A LOT.





Reagen Sulewski: What few ads they had for this were terrible, and appealed to the wrong demographic. It's boomers that have the best association with Astroboy, and they weren't going to be brought into the theaters with butt-installed machine guns. You can kind of place this in the same category with Thunderbirds and Speed Racer (which at least tried something different and succeeded at that, if not in box office terms).

Michael Lynderey: There's a clear message being sent here about old animated TV show adaptations - "thanks, but no thanks". Astro Boy is the kind of title that sounds vaguely familiar - you just know you've heard it somewhere before - but you don't know where and you don't much care to look it up and find out. The box office basically reflected that line of thinking. It's unfortunate in a way, because it was a pretty decent film, but the heavy competition was the seal of death to a project that already had a very questionable pedigree.

Max Braden: I had no conscious idea that this character was more than half a century old. And from the ads I saw it didn't look like anything different from what you could see on Saturday morning TV or playing Sonic the Hedgehog video games. For Summit, this is going to turn out a little better than their last animated distribution, Fly Me To the Moon, which grossed a total of $14.5 million. And they're too busy fantasizing about Twilight money to care. But it's another step down for writer-director David Bowers; his previous, Flushed Away, only managed to gross $64.5 million in the U.S. against a $143 million budget.

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