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Max Braden: I see this movie as potentially appealing to two audiences, (who probably overlap each other fairly well): younger Rachel McAdams fans, and the older Richard Curtis fans. The younger fans (although The Notebook is coming up on ten years old now) might see this movie's performance to date as a flop compared to the $33 million opening of The Wedding Crashers. Sure, that was mostly a Wilson/Vaughn comedy, but even Morning Glory opened to $9 million on 2500 screens. But for fans of Richard Curtis movies, this rollout is probably familiar speed, and Bill Nighy is as much the draw as anything. I'm more in the McAdams camp, and this box office performance worries me a bit. A dozen movies ago I think you could have looked at McAdams and imagined a career arc for her similar to Reese Witherspoon's or even Julia Roberts, where she'd at least have been nominated for an Oscar ten years down the line. McAdams is good at these lovely, enjoyable romances, but the bottom line is that another of those types of movies on a platform release isn't going to generate a lot of box office or award heat for her. If someone like Richard Curtis isn't available to make good quality romantic comedies, I think there's a danger of stepping into more direct-to-video quality comedies.

David Mumpower: About Time’s release pattern is old school in that the plan has been to build buzz organically for a project that feels like familiar territory in a lot of ways. The decision to cast Rachel McAdams, who had already starred in The Time Traveler’s Wife, was particularly quirky. I guess previous Richard Curtis movie actress Andie McDowell wasn’t interested in making the de facto sequel to Groundhog Day. Despite the familiar territory, audiences are giving the project the benefit of the doubt because it is a Richard Curtis movie, and he has yet to fail movie lovers. His films are always impossibly clever, uplifting and warmly remembered after the fact. About Time is not being released in a manner that is intended to build ardor over the holiday season. In order to accomplish that, the movie has to demonstrate enough holdover appeal in order to justify a decision to keep it instead of other, more heralded holiday films. I suspect it will wind up being a modest hit but I don’t expect About Time to leave theaters as the type of blockbuster that other Curtis romcoms have proven to be.

Kim Hollis: I think comparing it to other films from McAdams doesn’t really make sense, because this was never intended to be a “big” hit in the first place. It’s just a nice, slow rollout for a film that won’t make the majority of its profit in the United States anyway. There are people who are specific fans of Richard Curtis, and it’s probably more important to appeal to them than anything else here. That doesn’t translate to huge numbers, since most people probably couldn’t name the director of Notting Hill or Love Actually, but it does mean that it probably has a certain set amount that it will earn.

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