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Hey, animated vermin! How original.

Kim Hollis: The Tale of Despereaux opened to $10.5 million. Should Universal be pleased with this result?

Brandon Scott: This sucks terribly. I can't believe people didn't respond to this mouse. I also am surprised that the marketing must have been way off here. To me, the mouse seemed like a great underdog type of character that should have translated to kids and grabbed the adults here and there, too. Too bad. I was rooting for Despereaux, just cause he has some balls on him...taking chances and making the older mice shriek in fright. I wanted this to be the dark-horse performer of the season. Oh well.

Joel Corcoran: Pleased? Hardly. About the only thing Universal can be pleased about is that Tale of Despereaux had a better opening than the last animated movie release, Delgo. I don't know how anyone could be pleased with a $10.5 million opening when Alvin and the Chipmunks (which was a god-awful wretched mess of a movie) opened at $44.3 million a year ago, and Bee Movie, another disgustingly bad film, managed a $38 million opening weekend in November 2007. I don't think there's any good news to be had in Despereaux barely earning a quarter of what dreck like that opened to recently. However, I hope the film has a better run overall at the box office. The book (by Kate DiCamillo) is fantastic, and I'd like to see the movie do at least moderately well.

Scott Lumley: This is a terrible result for what looked like a really cute movie with some pretty good animation. I'm not that thrilled with Matt Broderick in the title voice role, but the trailers had me giggling in a couple of areas. I think Despereaux got creamed by the dual hammers of really lousy weather and holiday shopping. Hopefully it will recover enough over the next weekend to drag this into profitability. Does anyone have a line on what this cost to make? The animation doesn't look that fantastic but this sure doesn't look cheap either.

Reagen Sulewski: Let's not be too harsh - the budget is everything, so without that info it could be meeting expectations, or heads could be rolling at Universal. But the fact remains that if you're not Pixar or a sequel, you've got a really tough battle ahead of you to sell animation. It looks gorgeous, but too many parents have been burned on nice looking crap to try something new.

A historical note, though: The last time we had this calendar configuration for Christmas, another odd film about rodents had what seemed like a horrible start, then earned ten times for a total. I'm not saying this is going to be Mouse Hunt 2, but it's something to keep in mind.





Max Braden: No, but given the unexpectedly low opening for Bolt and the deflated weekend, I think they can excuse it as a result of overall depressed economic factors at work.

Ben Farrow: Despereaux looked beautiful but it was too complicated a story for animation's target. The side story of the dungeon guard should have been scrapped, and the intro of the queen's death was too long. The introduction of desperaux was delayed. It was beautiful to look at but man, was the pacing sloooowwwww. It should have started Indiana Jones-esque with despereaux doing some feat of daring-do through mousetraps, then roll into the main story. My son, who loved the book, didn't care much for the film. My younger daughter, who will watch anything animated, was bored and my friend's youngster (pre-K) wouldn't sit still. The theater was all but empty (less than a dozen people) and not a cough, laugh or anything could be heard.

It was an adult cartoon in a child's story. If you want word-of-mouth for kid's movies it has got to be linear, action packed and full on funny

Speaking of the theater - the main picture house was practicaly abandoned. I guarantee every movie sucked at the box office and the weather was not a factor.

Kim Hollis: Yeah, Ben. Our theater was exactly the same this weekend and it was 60 degrees here. We went to the the indie theater - which you can always count on to be packed at this time of year with people excited to see expanding films like Slumdog Millionaire. I think there were ten cars in the parking lot.

David Mumpower: A $10 million opening weekend and final box office in the $50 million range is what I had always expected for this movie. I guess the replies here show how much each individual's expectations for a title play into their evaluation of its opening weekend performance. I don't see this as anything other than a solid result for Universal. I never saw this title as having a blow-the-doors-off opening weekend and it's certainly not on the scale of the films Joel used for comparison. This title is more of a Space Chimps++, and it's performed as such. My only disappointment is that the reviews are decidedly mixed.

Daron Aldridge: The cost would determine Universal's take on Despereaux. The path David describes is close to how Hoodwinked performed in 2006, which wouldn't be horrible if it also had the reported $15 million budget of that film. Without the backing and reputation of a studio known for quality, entertaining animated films, like Pixar or Dreamworks, this is actually a bit higher than I expected.

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