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Felix Quinonez: I'm trying to find some sort of silver lining to this but I just can't see it. And I actually read its budget was $70 million, which just makes this performance even worse. This is definitely a disappointment in my book, especially when you look at the actors involved.

Edwin Davies: This is just the culmination of a run of bad luck for The Watch. Bruce alluded to the fact that the name of the film was changed from Neighborhood Watch following the Trayvon Martin shooting, and whilst it's easy to dismiss as a silly marketing ploy, I think it was that which doomed the film. I can only speak for myself, but I was generally unaware of The Watch prior to the news that its name had been changed following the Martin incident, at which point the first thing I associated it with was precisely that, and I imagine that it must have been the case for a lot of other people. By attempting to distance the film from something that was completely unrelated to it, the studio actually created a much stronger association than existed before, which meant that for people who had been unaware of the film prior to this - which I think would be a fair amount of people since the marketing campaign for the film hadn't really kicked into gear at that point - their first exposure to it was in relation to a controversial incident that played out in the national media.

Once the trailers started coming out and it became apparent that there didn't appear to be any strong jokes in the trailer, which is pretty much the most basic thing required to sell a comedy, the fate of the film was sealed. Even with three big names (and Richard Ayoade, star of The IT Crowd and writer-director of the brilliant coming of age comedy Submarine, which I would really recommend people check out on Netflix) it could not overcome the combination of unrelated tragedy and terrible, laugh-free promotional materials.

Reagen Sulewski: Despite what I said in the Batman comments, I doubt the connection with Trayvon Martin was still there - it doesn't share any similarities with the incident and the trial has gotten off into so many other avenues that the neighborhood watch part of it is kind of lost in the mists of time. The problem with this one was just that it plain wasn't funny. No one can murder a joke like Ben Stiller. He's back to Mystery Men territory with this.

David Mumpower: The reason why I disagree with Reagen here is not whether consumers distinguish the differences between The Watch and the Trayvon Martin shooting. Instead, the issue is that Fox lost its taste for The Watch when this occurred. The entire advertising campaign was fundamentally altered by that incident, and Fox never showed any passion for plan B. Reagen is absolutely right that the largest issue with The Watch was quality, but that would not have impacted its opening weekend box office the way that a lack of strong commercials could have. For the past five months, The Watch has been largely abandoned. It was a doomed project the moment the media picked up the Martin tragedy.

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