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Kim Hollis: Movie 43, the film that has gotten a lot of agents fired, opened to a meager $4.8 million, with a per location average of only $2,472. What went wrong here?

Brett Ballard-Beach: Truth be told, I was excited when the red band trailer debuted many months ago. It looked fucked up. But when that turned out to be the sole selling point of the movie (look at all these stars, some of them OSCAR WINNERS and they're doing raunchy filthy things!) without even a decent framing device or connecting device apparently, there turned out to be no "there" there. Maybe if it had been found footage a la Project X? Still, it was made for only $6 million (I read) meaning all involved didn't pretend they were doing anything other than cranking out a cheap piece of shit. So, that at least, is honest advertising (and yes I still want to see the skit with Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber home schooling their son. I don't want to see the one where Chloe Moretz gets her period.)

Felix Quinonez Jr.: To me it felt that this was a project in which the audience wasn't in on the joke. I feel like a lot of people had no idea what to make of this movie and that's never a good sign. People are still catching up on the Oscar nominees and tickets are expensive you have to at least try to give people a reason to see this movie instead of being too cool to try.

David Mumpower: The commercials for Movie 43 had the scent of desperation. I legitimately have no idea what anybody involved with this project was thinking. The entire exercise feels like a demonstration of how to exploit blackmail scenarios to force talented people into poor career choices.

Tim Briody: They made what is essentially an episode of a sketch comedy program that you can find on television, but they charged admission for it. That never ends well for anybody.

Max Braden: It's like someone was brainstorming at last year's Golden Globes open bar and said "You know, the only obvious avenue after Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve is an ensemble spoof movie" and then everyone was stuck with a legal napkin contract. Sadly, I think you could actually pull off an ensemble no-holds-barred comedy, but...they didn't. Anyone who saw the trailer had to be thinking, "Okay, but why?"

Reagen Sulewski: Don't underestimate the difficulty in selling R-rated comedy - since so many of the high points of the movie simply couldn't be shown in the ads. Now, it so happens that none of those jokes were any good in the first place, but it couldn't even put its best foot forward. I would say that the larger problem was indeed that there was just no real sense of what this is that made any sense to audiences. Jamming a whole bunch of random people together without a story or a particular hook just made no sense. Now, even with this horrible performance this weekend, it can still be profitable, but thankfully no one else is going to try to repeat this.

Kim Hollis: I never saw an ad for this film. Not one. I wouldn’t know it exists if I didn’t write for a movie site. I think the majority of North America is in the same boat.

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