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Matthew Huntley: What I take from this result is American moviegoers will see anything the industry tells them is an "event movie." Nobody wants to be left out, despite the awfulness of the product, so I think many people pay top dollar to feel like they belong. Either way you look at it - whether Dark of the Moon makes less than the original, more than the second or somewhere in between - it is an unqualified success for Paramount, and it angers me to say so since Michael Bay and friends have made no attempt to make these movies better. They are loud, stupid, uninteresting and sometimes boring. The action goes on for so long they become mind-numbing. Reagan is right that explosions sell, but only good explosions should. Transformers is full of too many bad or dull ones.

Kim Hollis: It's silly to say this isn't an excellent result. Did it lag a little behind Revenge of the Fallen? Sure. Who cares? People love these event-driven films and as long as Michael Bay makes them loud, outrageous and stupid, people will come (The Island had a smidge of intelligence behind it, so they didn't).

David Mumpower: Reagen is absolutely correct about the calendar configuration, which can destroy a July 4th title if the actual holiday falls on a weekend day. In this case, the Monday release artificially inflates the overall box office since people have more free time and Sunday works like a Friday, which is why the third Transformers film earned $30 million on three consecutive days. The $12 million extra it earned on Sunday combined with what is effectively a free $18 million yesterday boosts the revenue by $30 million simply due to the calendar.

Keeping that in mind, what I take from this result is that Michael Bay largely gets a pass in that everybody knows he doesn't make great movies yet they pay to see them anyway. In fact, I must admit that we had tickets for Saturday despite the fact that the previous Transformers film was among my least favorite tentpole titles of the decade. The only reason I haven't seen it yet is that my wife was sick that day, which Reagen hilariously described as her having Transformers flu, whose symptoms last exactly as long as is needed to miss show time for the screening.

Mmmm...popcorn.

Kim Hollis: In terms of disconnect between quality and box office results, do you consider Transformers the worst franchise going that does inexplicably well in theaters? Is it proof that perhaps we need more disposable popcorn films?

Max Braden: I don't think you need to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find popcorn films. To me, The Hangover is a great popcorn film. Get Smart was a great popcorn film, and in the same vein this year's Green Hornet was disposable but still light and watchable. The Transformers series seems to have tunnel vision with the idea that the way out of the tunnel is to head into more explosions. But even though the scale of box office is different, I'd pick the Fockers franchise as the worst one in regard to quality to performance ratio. We definitely do not need more of those.

Edwin Davies: I honestly can't think of a worse franchise currently going. At a push, maybe the Pirates of the Caribbean series since I really, really hate films 2-4, but the lighthearted fun of the first one stops me from completely condemning them. Plus, those films are just boring. The Transformers films are actively insulting, pandering AND boring, and I want someone to invent a term other than "blockbuster" to describe them so that they can no longer be included in the same category as Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars.

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