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Kim Hollis: Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return, a $70 million budgeted animated film, earned a dismal $3.7 million this weekend. Say something funny about Legends of Oz: Dorothy's return.

Jay Barney: A black and white film would have done better.

I guess I am surprised that this didn’t catch ANY traction. The biggest problem here is the massive $70 million budget. I tried to do some research on the studio involved, and while there are a couple of different threads, I believe this was an ambitious effort to put animation on the summer schedule and it failed miserably. Part of the creative team behind this had some success with last year’s Planes, and they will open Planes, Fire and Rescue later this summer along with Disney.

But this is an awful opening. This joins the biggest bombs of 2014. Transcendence, I, Frankenstein, Pompeii, and the Legend of Hercules have a little more company. A $3.7 million opening against a $70 million budget. Ouch.

Edwin Davies: Whoever greenlit this is probably clicking their heels together, desperately hoping to wake up and discover this is all a horrible dream.

I also have to assume that the majority of that $70 million went to the catering budget, because I saw the ads for Dorothy's Return and it looked like cut scenes from a game released in 1998. Legitimately one of the ugliest animated films I've ever seen, and I saw Doogal in the theatre.

Matthew Huntley: Perhaps the studio should try and re-sell it by inserting clips from the HBO series Oz and making it look like Dorothy returns to the prison to try and restore order. It could ride the success of Orange is the New Black.

Bruce Hall said, esoterically:

I assume the Scarecrow greenlit this one, right? Right?!

Anyone? Really?

And come on Edwin, let's not be too hard on the animation. I'm literally looking at the first trailer for the original Toy Story (1995) as I write this, and Legends of Oz doesn't look any worse than that.

I guess I just don't understand the level of ambition here. Did this movie really need to cost $70 million? I feel like Disney could have made the same movie for a pittance, released it straight-to-video and made several million dollars without breaking a sweat. And it would have looked much, much better.

This is an embarrassment of major proportion and there's no way to spin it and nowhere to hide. Heads will roll over this.

Max Braden: Like most legends, evidence of the existence of this one will be lost to the sands of time... I was going to dispute the comparison to Toy Story's trailer, but a quick look leads me to back off my knee-jerk indignation. Still, with trailers for movies like this, I wonder why they make any effort to release them in theaters. I have trouble imagining adults would want to go see it (unlike the Toy Story series), and it's just expensive to take the kids. Why not go direct to video?

Kim Hollis: Were people terrified of zombie Judy Garland when they saw “Dorothy’s Return” in the title? I honestly have no idea why anyone thought it was a good idea to make this film, or how any person in the development process imagined it would make money. A random person off the street could make better decisions than the people who chose to make Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return a reality.

David Mumpower: I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I did a double take when I saw the production cost for this film a few months ago. John Hamann received a few libelous insults a couple of months ago when he suggested that this film would bomb. If anything, he was too generous with his commentary. This Oz movie will be in the conversation for biggest bomb of the year when it's all said and done, right there with Transcendence.

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