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Kim Hollis: Oldboy, Spike Lee's remake of the Chan-wook Park cult hit, earned only $885,000 over three days and a paltry $1.3 million from Wednesday through Sunday. It had a $30 million budget, and will not be expanding beyond its current venue count of 583. Why did this fail so completely?

Felix Quinonez: Although I don't think it was ever going to be a hit, I think it was a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The movie was dumped in less than 600 theaters and the marketing was almost non existent. This was a great weekend for movies but when the competition is this strong studios have to fight for audiences. It was clear that wasn't being done for Oldboy. And I think the people who were even aware of the movie's release could sense that the studio gave up on Oldboy before it was even released. And if the studio doesn't care about its movie why should the audience?

Brett Ballard-Beach: To continue in the vein of defending the underdog, this did end up getting dumped - in its ad campaign, number of theaters, and being moved from its end of October release date, where it could have maybe made at least a few million more - leaving the question(s) of why. Spike Lee was reportedly forced to trim about an hour to bring it down to 104 mins and took his imprimatur "A Spike Lee Joint" off the end product as a result. (When I heard the running time, I knew there had to be trouble. Spike Lee doesn't do under 120 minutes). Film District has just been folded into Focus Pictures and this was the last film being released by them so this could have been dictated by the new management who didn't care for what Lee delivered. What this most reminds me of is Let Me In, also a remake of a cult horror/violent film which hewed very closely to the source material, and seemed destined to fail because a) the fans of the original most likely wouldn't be interested and b) it's tough material for a large audience in general. Let Me In had rapturous reviews and a wide release at Halloween and only made $12 million with its final domestic gross. Substitute middling reviews and a limited release and Oldboy's sad, sad gross might have been the result there as well. I am curious to see this, but must confess I would have been even more mind-blown to see the Spielberg/Will Smith version that was initially announced about four years ago.

Edwin Davies: It's pretty clear that the studio had no faith in it, as evidenced by their scaling back the marketing campaign and messing with its release date. That's on top of being a remake of a film which has a small but dedicated fanbase who have been pretty openly hostile to any prospective remake for years now (Remember when Steven Spielberg was reported to be interested in making it with Will Smith? That was a fun day on the Internet.) yet any faithful version of the story would be too bleak and crazy to draw in people who aren't already familiar with the material. It was in an impossible position of trying to appeal to a virtually non-existent audience. The decision to basically not support the film doomed it to doing poorly, but I think it was always going to have a difficult struggle regardless.

Tim Briody: Spike Lee isn't automatic box office nowadays, and to be honest I'm not even familiar with the source material. That this is a flop for the ages isn't terrible surprising. He reportedly financed his next film partially using Kickstarter, so that's instantly more interesting to me with regards of how it performs at the box office.

Max Braden: Part of the problem with remaking foreign cult hits is if you don't fully support them Hollywood style (like Point of No Return after La Femme Nikita) and bring in a wider audience, the original cult fans are just as likely to reject the remake as a false idol.

David Mumpower: I wondered aloud when the project was announced why a studio would even try it. What happened next was frankly predictable. New people got involved, the level of discomfort with the source material intensified and eventually everyone settled on running away screaming. Doing that before millions of dollars had been thrown at a project that was doomed to fail would have been the smarter play. Oldboy was as bad a mistake in the greenlight phase in recent memory.

Kim Hollis: I would agree that fans of the original film would not find much of interest in a remake, especially since I believe for many people it's the kind of movie you'd be okay with watching one time and then never, ever seeing it again. Since those people were already a hard sell, marketing it to a larger audience was going to be key and given the subject matter... well, that was just never, ever going to happen. It would have been an impossible assignment for even the best marketing genius.

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