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David Mumpower: Movie goers should take up a collection to get Nic Cage out of bankruptcy in order to stop him from making all of these god-awful movies. Out of the 120 movies I saw in 2011, two of the bottom five starred Cage. He must be stopped. Having acknowledged my bias against an actor who hasn't done anything good since Honeymoon in Vegas, I am less enthusiastic about the Ghost Rider sequel than some of you. You are all mentioning the relatively frugal budget. My thought is that with the holiday in play, the final multiplier (final domestic gross divided by opening weekend gross) for this film should fall under the weak 2.57 that the original made. It's a sequel, which ostensibly means it is front-loaded. Factoring in the holiday, I am not yet convinced this earns $60 million domestically. And if it falls in that range, it needs a lot of help overseas to break even in the short term. This is a better opening weekend than the product deserved and clearly a step up from Cage's other recent work but that doesn't automatically make it a win. What happens next determines the film's overall viability.

Max Braden: Considering how much they've been promoting the movie with an air of summer blockbuster being released early, I'm sure they're feeling let down. Considering that the movie is looks like a really lame attempt to cash in on a previous lame movie that happened to luck out at the box office, I think they should count themselves lucky again. Cage is too far gone to help, but it bothers me that Idris Elba was in this. I realize that he's still trying to establish himself in America, but he's too good for this. Come on, Idris, don't let Hollywood treat you like the hot girl who just stepped off the bus!

Kim Hollis: I just don't know how this even got a greenlight, and I didn't have high expectations for it. As everyone else has mentioned, Nic Cage just seems to be determined to make terrible movies (though I liked Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans as an oddity), and I think he's losing potential audience members in exponential fashion. I do wonder, as Brett mentioned, why Neveldine/Taylor didn't go for it more...I have to imagine studio meddling kept the movie PG-13 and tame.

On the plus side, I will thank Ghost Rider for inspiring the creation of Geoff Peterson.

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