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Maybe This Christmas will mean something more...

Kim Hollis: Disney was not the only studio celebrating this weekend. Sony's Screen Gems arm struck gold with This Christmas, which earned $27.1 million over five days. Why did this project succeed?

Pete Kilmer: That's easy...a black oriented holiday film with a strong cast sold that. It looks really funny and was THE first holiday film for black audiences in a long, long time.

Max Braden: This one surprised me because it had a Tyler Perry vibe to it, and even though Why Did I Get Married opened at $21 million, viewer opinion of his movies have been poor. Preston Whitmore's last movie, Crossover, is number 6 on IMDB's Bottom 100. Go figure.

Kim Hollis: Again, it's a safe family choice for the Thanksgiving holiday - and in this case it was targeted directly at what was apparently a very underserved demographic. With that said, I'm not entirely sure that the similar-looking The Perfect Holiday will enjoy similar success since it looks like an imitator (even with the beautiful Morris Chestnut and Gabrielle Union as the leads and my personal favorite Terrence Howard playing something called Bah Humbug).

David Mumpower: I think the struggles of Fred Claus show that it's far from automatic for a holiday-related movie to do great box office. I also believe that perception matters in such discussion because the Vince Vaughn film was clearly a disappointment yet this title with similar opening numbers is a bona fide hit. With regards to why one succeeded wherein the other failed, a lot of it is that we don't see African-American holiday movies very often. I've struggling in coming up with the name of the last one. Has there even been one? Novelty is a pretty good reason for such a strong performance.

What we really want is a Deadwood movie

Kim Hollis: The latest live action video game adaptation, Hitman, earned $21 million over five days. Is this more, less or pretty much what you were expecting?

Reagen Sulewski: I think that's about right. I don't think this was an extremely well known game franchise (could it have a more generic title?) and its one "star" was almost unrecognizable in it. It looked almost more computer generated than Beowulf.

Pete Kilmer: I think that's about right for this film. It was a B-level game series and not on the level of what Halo could be.

Tim Briody: Am I the only one who totally thought for a bit that Bruce Willis played the title character?

Max Braden: I really like the game but I thought from the trailers that Olyphant didn't have the heft for the role. I saw Hitman as a Thanksgiving stand in for a Bond movie. $20 million was about on target. I wouldn't expect it to have legs in any timeframe but the holiday season, and it will certainly be knocked down when I Am Legend opens three weeks from now.

Kim Hollis: I saw very little advertising for this other than trailers in front of a couple of movies, so I'm a bit surprised it fared even as well as it did. Max is right, though. It's not hanging around for any length of time and will make the bulk of its revenue on video.

David Mumpower: This is more than I was expecting. As much as I like Timothy Olyphant as an actor, I've never thought of him as a successful lead actor in major movie productions. And I also agree with Reagen that this is franchise is not on the level of Resident Evil, Final Fantasy or Halo. So, seeing such a solid opening five-day number surprises me. I guess it struck the right chord of vanilla action movie to get The Transporter's crowd to come out.

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