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Jason Barney: I don't mean to go the opposite way of my BOP colleagues, but if you take everything into account, this film may actually make money in the end. Believe me, the 27% RT rating or the #3 opening is not going to help in the long run, but I was shocked to see the international numbers so high at this early date. The lack of box office and the negative reviews seem to indicate everything is going to go downhill for this project pretty quickly, and it probably will, but I am going to take a wait and see attitude.

This is a film I probably will not see, but I wonder if the younger movie going demographic may still embrace it. A number of young people I know actually thought this was part of the Fast and Furious franchise. So I think there is a chance, even a slight one, that this one doesn't lose too much money.

The international dollars are what cause me to pause and reserve judgment about its prospects. $45 million from overseas markets at this early date is nothing to sneeze at. It has a lot of work to do, but stranger things have happened.

David Mumpower: Speaking as the crazy person who predicted mid-20s (even a touch higher, in truth), I am obviously disappointed in this result. Disney again supported a project in terms of sheer volume of commercials without finding the appropriate trigger to entice consumers into going. Need for Speed is a wildly popular videogame brand that failed to translate as a movie franchise. Edwin appropriately pointed out the list of similarly mediocre debuts save for Resident Evil, the oldest title of the group. Need for Speed may well prove lucrative enough overseas to earn back its investment and possibly even become a marginal winner as Jason indicates. It still is unlikely to merit a sequel, though. And that was definitely the intent with this title. It was supposed to be the first movie in a franchise rather than a moderate one-off film.

Max Braden: Whether or not Aaron Paul is associated with Breaking Bad, I don't think the Need for Speed target audience is even aware of who he is, so it's not like he was ever going to be the primary draw. No Vin Diesel = no F&F money is also not surprising. Both of those being said, then, I think this is a good result as far as what you could expect for a generic car chase movie based on a car chase video game. Not that Getaway's gross was any difficult hurdle to get past, but that terrible movie could not have helped the next car chase movie, so for Need For Speed to open at over four times Selena "The Ruiner" Gomez's movie is a nice win.

Kim Hollis: Tyler Perry's The Single Mom's club opened to $8.1 million, his lowest opening ever. What do you think of this result? Why do you think his last couple of movies have been trending downward?

Edwin Davies: I disagree that the last couple of films Tyler Perry has directed have trended downwards; A Madea Christmas made $52.5 million, which was lower than Madea's Witness Protection ($65.6 million) but in line with other Madea movies like Big Happy Family and I Can Do Bad All By Myself ($53.3 million and $51.7 million, respectively), and Confessions of a Marriage Counselor was one of his most successful non-Madea films. Up to this weekend, I'd say that Perry's films haven't been on a downward trend, but that he had reached a point where he had peaked and leveled off; his audience showed up pretty consistently, and his films all did pretty similar business, with a couple of films being bigger (Madea Goes to Jail) or smaller (Good Deeds) than others.

This result strikes me as something different than what we've seen up to this point. Not only did it open to only half of what his films have traditionally opened to (with the exception of Daddy's Little Girls, his least successful film prior to this) but it also seemed to have less support in terms of marketing and distribution - it's the first film he's directed that has opened in less than 2,000 theaters. As David noted in the Friday Box Office Analysis, this was the last film to be released under Perry's deal with Lionsgate, which might have resulted in the studio pushing it a lot less aggressively. Perry also seemed to be less interested in promoting it, which might stem from the fact that he's already sold the rights to a TV version, so the success of the film might be less important than it otherwise would be. Either way, there seemed to be less awareness than with pretty much all of Perry's films. As such, it might end up being one of the only films of his that doesn't see a profit.

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