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Tom Macy: At the risk of being unoriginal, the trailer was the problem. As someone who adores Philip Seymour Hoffman (I rewatched Synecdoche, New York on a plane recently, mind blowing!!!!), Bill Nighy and Nick Frost, to the point of it being unhealthy, the fact that I wasn't in a big hurry to catch this one says a lot. The whole little-radio-boat-that-could thing just felt a little contrived. I imagine many had the same reaction.

Reagen Sulewski: This film seems like it's pandering to several disparate groups at once. "So, we'll make film about the early days of rock music, to get the Boomers. Then we'll set it in England, to get that market, but hire an American as the lead to drum up interest in the US. And make sure he's not a major box office star, to get the indie crowd." I don't think this film knew who it was aiming at.

Brett Beach: I love Richard Curtis to death (scripting The Tall Guy and Notting Hill, directing Love Actually) but here he is stepping outside his safe realm of offbeat rom-com and giving us a tale of rebels in the 1960s using rock and roll to take on the man, which is more or less what Taking Woodstock did three months ago to a similar opening. Having the film renamed for American audiences after early ads showed it with its original title, trimming 20 minutes from the running time and giving it a barely wide release against the 2012 behemoth suggests an utter lack of confidence on Focus's part. North America was the last stop for this film, the grosses and reviews were mixed to middling internationally and they were here as well. In the end, the "Meh" factor was as loud as the buzz was on 2012.

Max Braden: I was automatically going to see it because of the stars I like: Hoffman, Nighy, Frost, and Ifans. But those are hardly household names for most Americans. I think they undersold the fact that this was a Richard Curtis picture - from whom Bridget Jones and Love Actually would have been familiar names. But mostly, and I didn't put much thought into this ahead of time because of my automatic interest, the trailer didn't offer much in terms of story or relationships. "Come spend ten bucks to watch an anchored boat's crew drop a needle on a spinning disk" is pretty thin. Plus, anyone who read the reviews ahead of time might have noticed the repeated comment that the movie was a failure when it was released in the UK this past spring. (Also noteworthy: buyer's remorse set in after I saw the movie and discovered that none of the characters were real people. I felt cheated by the trailer's basically false claim that rock and roll was banned and forced offshore.)

Kim Hollis: I am probably one of Richard Curtis's biggest fans, and I'm sure I'll see this movie in theaters, but it definitely has much more of an indie feel to it. Pirate Radio might have been better off with a platform release, and the studio would have known then that it didn't really have enough interest to expand.

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