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David Mumpower: I have been calling this one AARP Prison Break for a while now. And that sums up why I have had low expectations for it ever since January. When the solo projects from these dudes failed, there was no logical reason to expect different behavior from a joint project involving them. The real question I have moving forward is whether The Expendables franchise sees a similar hit now that the novelty of the idea has passed.

Kim Hollis: The Fifth Estate, a movie about Wikileaks featuring Benedict Cumberbatch, opened with just $1.7 million. Why didn't audiences show up for this one?

Matthew Huntley: If anyone is like me, they didn't know what this movie was about or what the title meant going into the weekend (curiosity may have prompted people to look it up). Those two factors alone are enough to kill a movie's business, and that seems to be the case here.

What's interesting is the marketing for The Fifth Estate was rather prolific, and I knew it was coming out this weekend (even thought about seeing it without knowing anything about it), but simply posting ads online and playing commercials is useless unless those ads and commercials are clear and enticing to the audience. Obviously, this wasn't the case. On top of that, the movie had no star power, despite the cast being talented.

Unfortunately, the studio is set to lose a bundle on this because it will likely show no legs and has little international appeal. It'll go down as one of those movies where if someone mentions it at all, the response will be, "Never heard of it."

Edwin Davies: I think Matthew hit the nail on the head in terms of how poorly the ads got across what the film was actually about. I know a little bit about WikiLeaks and a bit about Julian Assange, so I knew enough to get a general sense of what the film might focus on, but I struggled to see what the real conflict or story was about, other than leaking documents and how that may or may not be a bad thing. That ambiguity could be mined to make a fascinating film, and a relevant one given all the talk about invasion of privacy over the last year, but the ads failed to sell the idea that the film was interesting or important. It just looked muddled and confused, with no clear angle on the story for people who don't know much about WikiLeaks or a compelling hook for those who do. The bad reviews were probably the final nail in the coffin, though, since it probably made even the people who might be interested think better, especially when they could rent We Steal Secrets, the documentary on WikiLeaks which covers a lot of the same subject matter in a more thorough manner.

Jason Barney: All of the above. The subject matter does seem to be worthy. You would think there would be some support for a product like this, but you can't get much lower than a $1.7 million opening.

David Mumpower: Over the last few weeks of the United States government shutdown, I have engaged in conversation about the "insider baseball" aspect of politics. Some of the people who speak on the subject the most believe that they live in a bubble that does not reflect anything that an ordinary person wants to discuss. The same is true of journalism, a field that has been brought to screen innumerable times over the years, almost always with the same result. People latch onto certain stories but they simply do not care how the sausage gets made in most instances. Julian Assange is fascinating to me, and I enjoy debating the ethics of WikiLeaks a great deal. I believe that is an important subject that is glossed over too often because people do not understand the details enough. And even *I* had zero interest in the movie version of the story I have obsessively discussed since day one. In short, the marketing team had no chance here. This is a movie nobody wanted.

Kim Hollis: I'd agree that this could have been extremely timely and relevant, but the biggest problem for a theoretical prestige picture like The Fifth Estate is that bad reviews will absolutely kill it. It's not the kind of subject matter that automatically draws audiences into theaters, so if they're lukewarm or bad, people will either wait for video or just not bother at all.

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