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The next two movies will show that silence is just not that popular.

Kim Hollis: Silent House opened to $6.7 million, and less impressively, received an F Cinemascore. What are your thoughts on Silent House?

Bruce Hall: Maybe people confused it with Safe House and assumed they'd already seen it? At least, that's what I would be telling my bosses if I'm in any way responsible for this movie. I haven't seen Silent House but the synopsis sounds pretty generic, it stars the Olsen family equivalent of Stephen Baldwin, and in general I can think of no good reason to care about it.

Apparently, America agreed with me.

Brett Beach: Um, Bruce, I think Mary Kate and Ashley were (respectively) the Stephen and Daniel Baldwin of the Olsen bunch. Great media moguls/celebrities, though. Elizabeth seems like a Jennifer Lawrence on her way up from the indies upstart to me. I saw a trailer, thought it looked freaky, heard about the F score, did my due diligence and read the plot for this and the Uruguayan original on Wikipedia. Why isn't just having a scary intruder in the house story enough? Why gussy it up with "real time" (uh-huh) and "one take" (sure) and trotting out the hoariest of plot devices and explanations (no spoilers this time). You make the horror audience angry. You won't like them when they they're angry. (Here's hoping The Cabin in the Woods delivers.)

Shalimar Sahota: I've seen the original film, and while the supposed one take look is impressive, the resulting story is not. The too stupid to be clever conclusion just doesn't work. After seeing the trailer to the remake I was intrigued and hoped that it would improve on the original. However, that Cinemascore suggests that they've gone for authenticity and the faults have been carried over. With a reported production budget of around $1 million, I think distributor Open Road planned to dupe enough audiences so that it can at least make that much back on the opening weekend before dreaded word-of-mouth kills it. While it's not exactly Paranormal Activity numbers, it appears to have worked. Even if it falls out of the top ten next week it probably won't matter so much, for so long as they didn't overspend on the marketing, I'd say it's already a small success.

Max Braden: Strung out horror isn't my type of genre, but I thought at least a niche group would appreciate it. So that F score surprises me, especially after Olsen was so good in Martha Marcy Mae Marlene. The movie that comes to mind for me is the remake of Straw Dogs - constant pressure and home invasion - which would only appeal to a small audience. That film grossed a total of $10 million last fall, so this $7 million is a stronger performance.

Edwin Davies: The one-take idea always struck me as more impressive than scary, and since it's kind of hard to put it across in advertising short of just showing an unbroken sequence from the film, you just end up with a fairly generic looking horror film. There just didn't seem to be much particularly interesting to the story of this one to grab people, and the aesthetic choice was not one that grabbed people.

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