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Kim Hollis: The Finest Hours, another boat catastrophe movie, debuted with $10.3 million. What do you think of this result?

Jason Barney: It is not good. I like Chris Pine and I think he has a fine career in front of him, but even his rising star couldn't give this a little bit of a heartbeat. Not that January is full of hit movies, etc., but The Finest Hours is dead in the water after its first weekend. Opening in fourth to just $10 million against a budget of $80 million? The math doesn't work out. This will lose screens quickly and fall out of the top 10 soon.

Ryan Kyle: Outside of The Perfect Storm, the shipwreck disaster movie really hasn't found much success. $10.3 million against a $80 million budget (including inflated ticket prices from IMAX and 3D locations) is very concerning, especially for a film without a giant star to bring in the foreign coin. I saw the movie and was surprised how enjoyable it was given the lackluster trailers, however, like Westerns (we will get to that later), seafaring expeditions just isn't a genre that audiences care for much anymore.

Felix Quinonez: I don't think this is nearly good enough of an opening and I don't see any reason why its fortunes would turn around. And unlike KFP3, this won't have the benefit of being lifted by foreign audiences. I don't think it's a monumental disaster but the studio will definitely take a hit on it.

Ben Gruchow: I read somewhere else that Disney is in the odd position of having two of their last three films be financial disappointments relative to expectations (this and The Good Dinosaur) with that one massive success more or less shielding them from any perception of real financial loss. I don't know how relevant that really is, considering that most of the films that have opened on either side of Force Awakens have thrown slightly to moderately under their expectations, and there haven't really been any big movies that have really broken out above their expectations; The Revenant comes the closest.

What this says to me is that Disney knew this was going to be a weaker entry on their slate no matter what, and they positioned it more or less directly in between their two bigger offerings on the slate: TFA five weeks ago, Zootopia five weeks from now. They figured this would probably give it maximum capability to generate revenue while minimum opportunity to cannibalize the audience for either of their other two. They were more or less correct in all of these, and The Finest Hours was positioned and marketed in a way that indicated that - like several films from this month - the studio just didn't really care what happened to it one way or the other.

Kim Hollis: It's a pretty lackluster result, if utterly unsurprising. I wonder if The Perfect Storm is the only one of these that really worked because that money shot in trailers is only impactful the first time. There just wasn't anything here that looked interesting.

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