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Reagen Sulewski: I hate to hedge my bets but it really depends how well this carries through Christmas. This is clearly not the result they were hoping for with a $200 million budget but how many other sequels to 28-year-old movies do you see opening to $40-plus million (on quick glance: E.T., Poltergeist and Gandhi)? It's found money from their vault in a way, assuming they can drag it into the black through Christmas, foreign territories and ancillaries. But where this failed to break out, in my opinion, is that people eventually remembered, "Hey, this is Tron. It wasn't that good the first time."

David Mumpower: Brett, that was exactly why Kim and I included that statistic about December $40+ million openers. It gives us all a nice baseline for Tron Legacy expectations. I also wanted to get the King Kong scenario of $190 million in there to show what happens to semi-disappointing December blockbusters. They do fade a bit quicker, which meant that a $50.1 million opening in 2005 led only to a $218.1 million final domestic result. We had discussed Tron a lot several months ago in Trailer Hitch, and most of our expectations were similar in that it was a film we had not been excited about in the least prior to seeing the luscious visual effects. After that, we were almost all allowing for the possibility that something special could happen here. That hasn't proven to be the case; still, Tron Legacy has also opened well enough that it's not going to be arbitrarily dismissed as another disappointing internet buzz film. We're not talking about the second coming of Avatar any more as had seemed possible six months ago yet we are talking about a strong opening for a relatively obscure Disney property. I see this as a draw for now with the possibility to bump up to a win if it does well the rest of the month.

Kim Hollis: I think the opening might be slightly disappointing due to overhyped expectations. Tron is the very definition of a niche film. It's a sequel that targets an audience who probably never saw the original film. So, we're looking at fanboys and people who just like shiny movies as the potential audience. A couple of weeks ago, when I realized I didn't hear anyone talking about Tron: Legacy, I started wondering if we might not have another Speed Racer on our hands. I think that's a pretty fair comparison film as it's also based on a cult "classic" and full of grandiose special effects. The good news for Disney is that Tron: Legacy did much better than Speed Racer, and there are enough people who are giving it a moderate nod of endorsement to keep people interested and talking. For someone who just wants a fun time at the movie theater over the holidays, it's a solid option. That should be good enough to take the film close to matching its budget domestically, which is not great, but good enough.

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