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Bruce Hall: What went wrong is that Snyder was declared a wunderkind and given carte blanche before he'd truly earned it. If you're going for the sort of career Zack Snyder seems to want, Sucker Punch is the sort of vanity project you save for after you've already had your defining career moment. Snyder's work is definitely distinctive but that alone doesn't make someone a genius. As a fan of anime, I'm all for girls in skimpy outfits with machine guns fighting giant robots and zombies. But if you're going to make a film with no point and no credible story, you'd better at least make people laugh. Sucker Punch was stylish, loud, slick, and otherwise visually stimulating. But it wasn't fun, it wasn't funny and even the most indiscriminate moviegoer should find it shamelessly derivative. The way reviewers almost universally piled on to this movie is something you don't see often, and only the precious few who were going to be okay with a movie like this were ever going to see it. It's a train wreck of a film, but now that I've finally made the switch to BluRay, I promise you Sucker Punch will be joining my collection as soon as it's available. I can just turn down the sound and have it up on the big screen for atmosphere when I have parties. People love that.

Matthew Huntley: Despite its dismal reviews, Sucker Punch is not awful. It's ambitiously bad and serves no significant purpose, but to its defense, it's at least bad on an interesting/inoffensive leve and there have been much worse movies this year (Green Hornet). Still, with that said, I completely agree with Bruce that this was Zack Snyder's premature vanity project and it had no real point or story worth telling, which, unfortunately for Warner Bros., was conveyed in the trailer and advertisements, which is why most people outside of the narrow geek/Comic-Con crowd avoided it this weekend. If a movie's trailer has people asking, "What's the point?", then you know the movie is in trouble. With guaranteed drop-offs in the mid to high 50% range in the coming weekends, Sucker Punch will likely be but a memory by the time Easter gets here.

Tom Houseman: Christopher Nolan and James Cameron can bring in audiences to see original blockbusters based on their names, and Zack Snyder cannot, it's as simple as that. People saw 300 and Watchmen because they wanted to see those stories told on film, not because of Snyder. Yet even though Watchmen underperformed, he was given much more freedom (and an absurdly high budget) for Sucker Punch. Had it been made for $50 or 60 million, instead of $80 million, everyone would be happy with this number. It's not a breakout hit, and it's not a franchise starter, but it's respectable. But now the movie is going to be seen as a disappointment, and Snyder will have to go back to churning out adaptations.

Reagen Sulewski: Sure, 300 and Watchmen were based on things and Sucker Punch wasn't, but do we really think that there were $70 million worth of fans of Frank Miller or $50 million worth of fans of Alan Moore? The Spirit and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen tell me otherwise. No, in this case I think it's something a lot simpler - audiences can smell desperation. The kitchen sink technique failed because audiences were able to figure out that this was just a mess. Also, I have to think people were scared to go to this movie and see Chris Hansen waiting for them outside the theater.

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