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Felix Quinonez Jr.: I think Bruce makes a lot of good points but if I'm just being honest its success still boggles my mind.

Jay Barney: I'm surprised too, but people enjoy quality work. It appears as though this has been put together in a very nice way, and audiences have responded. It was released at the right time, and took in the rewards from the holiday season. It is still going fairly strong. Perhaps this is a note on how much musicals have been embraced as a legit choice of entertainment again. The recent history is pretty good, and even ones like Rock of Ages released last summer were not out and out failures.

Brett Ballard-Beach: I don't think the accomplishment here should be undersold: In the last eight years, two of the most popular and acclaimed musicals of the last four decades became critically savaged, underperfoming features. One was 2004's The Phantom of the Opera, which somehow creeped to $51 million against a $70 million budget simply by hanging around for several months. It was only in the top 10 for one week and never played on more than 1,500 screens. 2005's Rent petered out at $30 million on a $40 million budget and earned over half its gross in the first five days, opening at nearly 2,500 screens. I think an air of prestige surrounded Les Mis from the beginning and was borne out by the trailers (which left some weeping) and then the early reviews. The cast is respectable to acclaimed and this became a must-see on opening day for a lot of its target audience. The tremendous word-of-mouth has sustained it from there and Oscar noms should help push it a lot closer to $200 million than anyone might have imagined.

Max Braden: In my mind, this can be narrowed down to one thing: Anne Hathaway singing "I Dreamed a Dream." I'm not big on Broadway productions, but the moment I first saw and heard the trailer, I thought you'd never hear anyone get as heartfelt as she does with that song. She seems like an instant lock for Best Supporting Actress based on the trailer alone. Of course, when the pretty young thing in my office heard Russell Crowe is in it, her eyes lit up, so there's that too. Aside from cast, I think you can see a difference when you put the movie up next to Anna Karenina, too. Karenina looks like an artsy costume drama that industry eggheads would be interested in. Les Mis looks like the kind of big screen commercialized drama that Hollywood started doing so well in its golden age of musicals. It looks like a big budget, must-see Oscar movie. Finally, and the reason I think Les Mis can give Lincoln a run for Best Picture, is that it features a lot of the 99%, 47% themes that this country dealt with all year because of the presidential election. I would not expect a pure musical to win the weekend, but this looks like the Oscar movie to see this season, even more than The Hobbit wanted to be.

Edwin Davies: I think Max has hit the nail on the head. Les Miserables had a lot going for it in the first place - based on a wildly successful stage production, great cast and an Oscar-winning director whose previous film did pretty well - but there was still the question of whether or not it would live up to the promise. A lot of films based on popular musicals don't do well, and I think that people might have been on the fence unless something about the film struck them as special. Putting "I Dreamed a Dream" front and center in the trailer provided that something. It's easily the best moment in the film, and it seemed to galvanize fans and non-fans to check it out.

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