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Joel Corcoran: I'm disappointed, actually, though obviously not as disappointed as Joaquin Phoenix. The whole vibe of the film seemed to me like a poor man's version of The Departed, so I wasn't expecting a whole lot from it, but at the same time, I was hoping for something closer to a $15-20 million opening.

Reagen Sulewski: Contrasting with what I just said about Michael Clayton - people do get shot in the trailer of this and they still couldn't sell it that well. Both Wahlberg and Phoenix have had much better results than this before, so it has to be considered a disappointment for the type of movie it is. The biggest problem for me was that it looked like such a retread of other movies, very specifically The Departed. And as much as we talk about reviews not mattering for box office, the mediocre reviews for this kept it from breaking out. They just couldn't generate hype for it.

David Mumpower: This is a much lower performance than I had expected a few months ago. As release approached, I still thought it might do well on opening weekend, but the failures of The Brave One and Death Sentence were early warning signals. It angled to be a clone of The Departed but the tone of star power driven vigilantes was unmistakable in the trailer. That's a premise being rejected by mainstream audiences at the moment. So, being the third title of that ilk in two months is equal parts poor timing and bad planning from Sony. It should have been moved away from the copycat releases near it.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is false advertising.

Kim Hollis: Elizabeth: The Golden Age opened to $6.2 million from 2,001 sites. What do you think of the opening, and more importantly, how concerned are you by the resounding critical rejection to the sequel of one of the best movies of the 1990s.

Joel Corcoran: Barely $6 million is abysmal, and I'm disheartened to say the least, both by the box office performance and the critics' slams. Elizabeth still remains one of my all-time favorite movies, and this movie already seems to be a flop.

Reagen Sulewski: The way things are going, this might end up on the Caddyshack 2 list. It seems pretty clear that Shekhar Kapur didn't really understand what people liked about his first movie. The opening weekend isn't so bad in the scheme of things - it was never going to open huge - but the fact that it's going to be "one and done" is.

David Mumpower: The news here is grim. Long-time readers of BOP (and its predecessor) are aware of the fact that our staff loved the movie, Elizabeth. We were championing it as one of the most cerebral movies of the '90s even before the Academy gave it so much love. A Best Picture nominee along with six other nominations says it all about how strong the quality of the original was. The news that 74% of critics dislike its successor is soul-crushing. There was almost a decade to plan a quality sequel. This turn of events is demoralizing.

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