New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Felix Quinonez: I think this is definitely a disappointing opening. It's true that it's not a total bomb and maybe it'll even break even. But I'm sure expectations were higher than that. And it will no doubt be added to the list of "Next Hunger Games/Potter/Twilight" failures.

Edwin Davies: I'll echo everyone else's assessment of this as something of a disappointment. It's by no means a disaster, certainly not when we compare it to, say, The Mortal Instruments or Beautiful Creatures, but it's still probably not a good enough opening to warrant future films considering how much the outlay was. The risk was spread across multiple companies, and most of them will probably get their money back down the line, but considering how acclaimed the books are, they all had to hope this would be a breakout success so that they could make some real cash on the sequels. This result suggests that any future films would have to be made for considerably less money.

Tim Briody: Obviously this isn't great relative to budget, but it's fine. As generally well known as the books are (or at least this book), it still falls into the "deep cuts" when you talk about sci-fi writing. That it came close to $30 million is pretty good. I really don't know how well this one will play overseas, but if Lionsgate doesn't break even, I'll be surprised.

Reagen Sulewski: I think you guys might be giving a little too much leeway by judging it just based on itself. While this isn't all that bad for one film alone, this is a huuuuge loss in terms of opportunity costs when you think about how many books there are in this series. No studio is thinking about one film when they buy a property anymore - it's all about the franchise. This is one that gets killed in the cradle. I mean, The Golden Compass did fine when you take into account international box office, but we haven't seen that second film, have we?

David Mumpower: I concur with Reagen in that $110 million wasn't invested in the project for an upper-$20s opening weekend. Ender's Game as a potential franchise has been mentioned for 25 years now. A quarter century of discussions led to an opening weekend that is inferior to that of Jack the Giant Slayer. Jack. The Giant Slayer. Come on. There is no way to sell this other than as the death of hope. It's like all of the Potter clones that targeted the tween audience prior to (and now after) The Hunger Games. They universally failed to the point that the next most successful one is Percy Jackson simply because some idiot gave the greenlight to a sequel. Simply by getting a second film, it garnered a better result than all of the Eragon type titles. And the Percy Jackson sequel failed to earn back 70% of its production budget domestically. That's what passes for a solid performance for tween lit adaptations in the post-Potter climate. Ender's Game is simply the latest in an ever-growing list of failed attempts. All this knowledge reinforces is how special The Hunger Games is for beating long odds.

Continued:       1       2       3       4