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Edwin Davies: I agree completely with Matthew that, considering the relative star power of the two films and relative size of the studios involved, this result is worse than Beastly's. Amanda Seyfried's coming off the best year of her career, commercially, with Dear John and Letters To Juliet providing her with back-to-back hits that seemed to have turned her into a star, so I would have expected that to help buoy Red Riding Hood at least a little bit. The fatal miscalculation seems to have been making a film aimed at exploiting the lucractive Twilight audience then failing to get across the romantic angle that would actually appeal to that audience. That, and failing to realize that making a werewolf movie out of Red Riding Hood was a really quite terrible idea.

Reagen Sulewski: What's interesting about these results to me (and I'd add I Am Number Four in to the group) is that you simply can't force a trend with today's teens. Studios have attempted to jump on the Twilight bandwagon with significant fervor - "Hey kids, well you like that, then how about this?" but they've almost universally said "meh." It's the same problem that all the various Harry Potter knockoffs have had - teens only want the thing they want, and not anything else. It's the same mistake studios will make trying to capitalize on Hunger Game knockoffs.

David Mumpower: Reagen touches on a key point. Studios have an imperative to create audiences for their various releases. They did this well at the start of the 2000s, but the social media era appears to have them stymied. They are currently paying for the right to market bombs and disappointments, which makes me wonder if we will start to see a re-evaluation of marketing budgets moving forward. Red Riding Hood is not a movie that will be helped by advertising, at least not conventional methodology. To a larger point, a Red Riding Hood movie? Really? Didn't Hoodwinked already cover this ground plenty enough for a quarter century or so?

Apparently we don't mind if Mars takes our moms.

Kim Hollis: Mars Needs Moms delivered one of the worst performances ever for a Disney animated movie, opening to $6.9 million, with a pathetic per location average of $2,218. Are you surprised by how much it bombed? What do you think went wrong?

Matthew Huntley: Judging on the quality of the trailer only (as I've yet to see the movie), I am not surprised by this performance. I know I'm not alone when I say the trailer stunk and was so poorly cut that it made it hard to believe anyone would ever want to see the entire movie. It made it look unattractive, unfunny, unpleasant and just plain loud and obnoxious (especially the fat space man character, who made me shudder). That's where I lay most of the blame - the trailer.

But I'd say the title of the movie was also a problem. Mars Needs Moms doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, and when parents/kids have trouble saying the name, they're not going to buy tickets. I think it's safe to say the marketing team for this is in trouble come Monday morning and Disney will be using the same word Kim did: pathetic.

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