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Edwin Davies: I consider this a pretty solid result for all the reasons stated so far - the time that passed between Scream 3 and 4, which can't help but hurt awareness of the franchise amongst the young people that are its target audience, the sweeping changes that the horror genre has seen in that time, and the fact that most of the original fans of the series have outgrown it whilst not that many new fans have come to replace them - and I would also venture that it is a very good result when we consider just how bad Scream 3 was. Maybe I'm misremembering, but at the time a lot of people were disappointed with the third film, and for me it tarnished the series as a whole. For the series to return after such a long time away and with that much bad blood to overcome, I'd put this as a good start for Craven, Williamson and Dimension to build upon for future installments.

Shalimar Sahota: I would admit to being slightly disappointed. Given how the sequels opened, I was expecting this to reach the $30 million mark, or over $25 million at least. I would have argued that the previous films built up a new fan base, through video/DVD. But from this result it looks like there are so few now who care to see how Scream has progressed. This is ten years too late and reminds me more of the other long overdue sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which opened similarly last year. I'm sure this will earn its production budget back domestically and show a good enough profit from international grosses to carry on with a fifth film, though I personally think Dimension Films should leave it alone. Still, if they do go ahead, I think they should take Ghostface out of Woodsboro, or maybe they should just go really meta and make Stab.

Pete Kilmer: It just goes to show the changing box office landscape of the past 10 years where an $18 million opening is a bit of a failure. I think it's a solid result *if* this results in a new storyline with newer (i.e. cheaper) stars to cut the budget.

Max Braden: Time between franchise entries didn't hurt the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, which opened to $32 million at the end of April last year. (Though from the $18 million perspective that looks pretty good, at the time, MMQB was generally unenthusiastic about Nightmare's opening.) Notable to me is that the first three Screams were winter releases, opening at Christmas (Scream 2 debuted against Home Alone III - wow, that was a long time ago.) and Feb 4th for the third entry; mid April feels a little like limbo for this kind of project, but it certainly didn't punish Nightmare as noted above. I saw surprisingly little advertising for Scream 4 up until the very close to release day. I think the death knell there is when your franchise entry is seen as alternate programming to the likely weekend winner...

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