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Shalimar Sahota: It looks too much like a 300 wannabe to me, and because of that I thought it was going to fail. Opening at over $30 million is way better than I expected. In fact, I'm surprised that audiences have been more kind to this than with the similarly themed Conan the Barbarian. Seeing adverts describe how Immortals is in "epic 3D" probably helps sell the format more than the film, and as Matthew highlighted, a majority of audiences went out of their way to pay extra for it. However, finding out that it was "mostly" converted makes it anything but epic. That it already has a worldwide total of $68 million means that Immortals will become the highest grossing film of Tarsem Singh's career, that is until Mirror Mirror opens.

Reagen Sulewski: I'm definitely surprised at this, since I thought we were over this kind of empty spectacle of style with no story. As others are pointing out, any port in a storm, I suppose, especially with how we've had a notable lack of outright hits lately. Instead, we're settling for these modest $80 to $120 million medium-sized hits (Puss in Boots being the freakish exception). I think the lesson here is that if you want a hit, copy another hit to just the right level.

Brett Beach: The advertisting did the film's work for it. I am astounded at the tally, even with the quite large cratering from Friday to Saturday and on the weekend multiplier in general. To borrow haphazardly from another genre, I felt this would perform more like Skyline than Battle: Los Angeles, even with a true artiste at the helm. I am a little saddened as this is a Tarsem film I have no interest in seeing (and I love both The Cell and The Fall in equal measures for their vastly different tones and sad beauty). A film that came close to making half of what 300 did on its opening weekend, without the novelty or the lineage of that film, filled some kind of audience craving.

David Mumpower: If Mr. Huntley hadn't posted the Real Steel comparison, I would have. What we have seen with both of these titles is that in the absence of quality action films, anything other than Green Lantern is good enough for some consumers. Immortals is as vanilla an action movie as we'll ever see open to $30 million. Everything about it exudes low budget knockoff rather than inspired new idea. Yes, the opening weekend performance has been bought to a certain extent (I feel like I've been seeing commercials for this since March), but a new property has debuted to a good enough number to secure a strong first place finish. That's an impressive feat for Relativity Media.

Will to live...fading...fading

Kim Hollis: Tyler Perry's Jack and Jill opened to $25 million over the weekend, which strikes us as a cry for help from a lot of North Americans. How did Sony pull this off and who can we blame?

Edwin Davies: The simple fact of it is that Adam Sandler has reached the point in his career where his fans will turn out for absolutely anything he does no matter how lazy and terrible the films themselves look. I mean, everyone has been making fun of the Jack and Jill adverts for months now. It says something about how unfunny they are that only cutting them into a long-forgotten George C. Scott film was the only way of making them entertaining. Yet it still pulled in this much because Sandler doesn't have to try anymore and, as the shit sandwich of Grown Ups, Just Go With It and Jack and Jill will attest, he no longer is. The question is whether or not Jack and Jill will be his thirteenth $100 million earner in 13 years, and I have to think that it won't be (if only to stop myself plummeting into a pit of deep, dark despair) since this is one of the lowest openings of his recent career. The film of his this most reminds me of You Don't Mess With The Zohan, which barely scraped $100 million despite opening $12 million higher than Jack and Jill has, so unless Jack and Jill has a robust multiplier of 3.9, I don't see it making that much. Maybe it won't crater and wind up in the $50 million range the way that Funny People did, but this probably (hopefully?) won't prove to be one of the successful Sandler offerings and I doubt it'll cover its $80 million (yeah, I know, it's insane) budget, at least domestically.

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