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Joshua Pasch: I'd have to agree with Shalimar that the trailer was pretty effective in peaking my interest for this one, but then the reviews were a much more effective deterrent. I will say the one thing: the trailers lack a fantastic, world-beating, wow moment, of which the 2012 has, I don't know, 50? LA is a gorgeous city that I personally romanticize, but it also isn't filled with iconic landmarks. So when you're staging a battle on the beaches of Santa Monica and you're not trouncing something like, say, the Empire State Building, it just doesn't seem as grand. I wish the movie were better reviewed because watching aliens storm the beaches like it was Normandy might have been pretty cool to watch.

If Matthew's right in that this only cost $70 million then this should absolutely turn a profit for Sony and they should be very pleased regardless of second week drop-off. Disaster films tend to make huge bucks internationally, and this shouldn't be an exception. I know there are huge budget/marketing differences, but this also reminds me of Cloverfield, which similarly did a good job of not revealing the alien/monster too much in the ads and was set primarily in just one American city. Cloverfield opened to $40 million and finished with $80 million and I can see a similar $75-90 million finish here for Battle: Los Angeles. If Battle: Los Angeles changes its international title to be less USA-Centric, then I'd project it to at least gross another $100-200 million overseas as well.

Edwin Davies: It's a result that is better than the film deserves, by all accounts, and even if it suffers a colossal drop off in its second weekend - which seems like a given considering the genre and the consensus that it both sucks and blows - then it seems pretty much guaranteed to make its budget back domestically, or at least get very close to that. This is a textbook example of clever marketing creating buzz loud enough to drown out enough of the naysayers for at least one weekend, and that tactic will make this a pretty comfortable win for Sony.

Reagen Sulewski: I tend to view films like this in terms of opportunity cost. If you're making a big FX-drive alien war movie, it really shouldn't matter a lot when you're releasing it or who stars in it - they all have the potential to be major, major hits. So while they might ultimately end up making money on this, I can't see any circumstance in which you've taken what could have been a summer tentpole film and brought it in where it'll make under $100 million and be happy with it. International box office could turn the tide like with 2012, but I kind of doubt it.

Kim Hollis: Frankly, this opening is better than I anticipated. There was nothing that looked special about this movie to me, but clearly I am not in the target demographic. Sony's going to make good money off of this film, and they should be thrilled that they pulled it off given the absolutely vicious reviews it is receiving.

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