Monday Morning Quarterback Part I

By BOP Staff

August 20, 2012

I do not have roid rage!

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Felix Quinonez: This is pretty much what I was expecting. I feel like so much the first movie's appeal was its novelty and that has obviously worn off a bit so I always expected this movie's earnings to decline. But it still held a very good portion of the first movie's opening weekend and with its much better reviews and "A-" cinemascore rating, I think this will have some decent legs. When you add in overseas grosses it should be a hit.

Reagen Sulewski: I might call this slate of films The Weekend Where Everything Went Exactly As It Was Supposed To, More or Less. While I understand why there's a tendency to see this as a disappointment relative to The Expendables 1, there's one thing people are forgetting - that movie was terrible and didn't deserve a sequel. The first movie was built on the novelty of "wouldn't it be awesome if we got all the action stars and put them in one movie?" to which the answer was, "no, it would not." It made enough to justify round two, but a good number of people were already wise to this idea and even the addition of Willis, Schwarzengger and Van Damme didn't really make a difference.

Shalimar Sahota: Well it's good, if not spectacular. Even I thought this would open slightly higher, somewhere between $35 - $40 million. It has me feeling like I've been slightly misled into thinking that The Expendables was well liked and picked up a decent following on DVD/Blu-Ray. I guess what's happened here is that there are some who saw the first film and were content. They simply didn't need a second serving, regardless of who was on the platter. Still, unless it suffers a horrific drop next week I don't think it's in any trouble, and I'm sure overseas grosses will be enough to go ahead with a third film.




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Jim Van Nest: I'm with Reagen on this one. Sure, it dropped from the first film, but I'm surprised people expected an increase. The novelty was in the first film. Sure, they added Van Damme and Norris, so that was cool. I think what this really needed was to get Segal in there. Then '80s action movie nerds could finally get the answer to "who would win, Van Damme or Segal?" That might have been the only way to top the original. Should they actually go forward with a third, I would expect it would drop even more.

David Mumpower: Like Shalimar, I expected a higher opening than transpired. Despite this, I agree with most of the comments made today. In hindsight, the one factor involving the opening weekend of The Expendables 2 I disregarded too much was the quality of the first film. I presumed that clever trailers that featured The Terminator and Die Hard actually doing stuff would more than compensate than the mediocrity of The Expendables. In talking with people who did not go see the movie, this is the point they stressed and I feel like an idiot for ignoring it. Why? This happened to be exactly the reason why I didn't watch The Expendables 2 on opening weekend, either. The Expendables was a total letdown for me. I didn't want to get burned twice. This is the same theme BOP has stressed that the quality of the most recent movie directly impacts the opening weekend of the successor. The difference is that we ordinarily say that as a positive. In this particular instance, the quality of The Expendables was a negative.


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