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Jason Barney: I have not seen it yet, but you have to think the studio is excited about the results. Just on the basis of the competition, it opened north of $50 million dollars on the same weekend Madagascar 3 opened with $60 million. That has to mean something. Even though it lost the weekend to Madagascar, it won on Friday and the weekend was in play.

The R rating may have had some movement on the numbers, but my guess is Fox is pretty happy. They took a franchise that was awesome in the 1980s (25 years ago) and then floundered with two bad films in the 1990s (Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection) and had a very nice weekend with it. I know the Alien vs Predator movies belong in the discussion, but as a science fiction fan, I kinda put them in a different category than the true Alien stories.

One of the things I am interested in as a movie fan, and as a big fan of the Aliens franchise is the "no it isn't" / "yes it is" back story in the marketing. I wonder if they didn't promote the association early on because they felt fans had become tired of the franchise or didn't like the direction of Alien vs Predator. The film looks original and different from the rest of the them, but had an outstanding trailer with a different feel to it. I bet the legs for this one will be significant. The opening was good, and I know several sci-fi fans who have not seen it yet. They plan on going in the coming weeks.

Daron Aldridge: In putting together the Alien screenshot HWDYK quiz, I used the box office takes of the first four films (ignoring AvP films) as "scoring" and I was underwhelmed by the numbers. But the $60.2 million of Alien in 1979 and the $77.6 of Aliens in 1986 are vastly more impressive when adjusted for inflation (approximately $194 million and $185 million respectively, which are admittedly the definition of "lowballing") but the $54.8 million of 1992’s Alien 3 and $47.7 million of 1997’s Alien: Resurrection (approximately $104 million and $82 million adjusted) would be viewed as middling today.

The good news heading into this weekend was that Prometheus was more akin to the first two films, but I didn’t think that it would hit $50 million. Not because of the quality of the film but rather its earning potential. Look no further than Bruce’s description, “It's about a brainy team of scientists and a robot who go looking for God and find chest bursting horribleness instead.” But then its $21 million happened on Friday and I think 20th Century Fox has to be somewhat disappointed that it only mustered up a multiplier of 2.38. The biggest concern is that if it can’t have legs in its opening weekend what does that mean for the subsequent weekends? I’m going with $110 million as best case scenario and that is probably optimistic.

Shalimar Sahota: Kinda close to expectations to me. The R-rating would have had an effect for sure, but I like that Fox went with it, because a PG-13 Prometheus would have made for a heavily sanitized film and lessened the overall impact. I feel that the marketing has been spot on in building up the mystery to the point where anyone would be remotely curious to find out what the crew of Prometheus discover. However, many reviews have interestingly pegged the film as good rather than great, which would probably suggest to anyone who is on the fence that it's not one to rush out and see on opening weekend.

Felix Quinonez: kind of have mixed feelings about this opening. Before the weekend, If I was told it would earn $50 million I would have been really impressed by it because it does look a bit too "brainy" to really break out. But after I saw that $21 million Friday, I kind of let my expectations get a bit out of control. I was expecting/hoping something close to Inception so that drop from Friday to Saturday is a bit disappointing. I know we should factor in the fact that it earned about $3.6 million on Thursday night midnight screenings but Inception had similar midnight numbers and still managed to stay about even on Saturday. I still think it's a definite win for the weekend but I'm concerned about how well it will play in the coming weeks.

Max Braden: As eye-candy pretty as the trailer looked, I was expecting a lot more. Wasn't this the movie we were all looking forward to most out of the non-sequels over the last six months? On the plus side, Prometheus actually earned more per location on Madagascar while having 20% fewer screens.

Kim Hollis: I think we can already infer from behavior so far and very mixed word-of-mouth that legs are going to be an issue here. I actually thought Prometheus would open a bit higher than it did, but I'm sure the studio is plenty content with the results. It's going to be a moneymaker overall, and I do think that it's sparked enough interest and discussion to justify a sequel, even amongst those who didn't like the film completely.

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