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Edwin Davies: The X-Men returned, or at least created an alternate timeline in which they never went away, with Days of Future Past, which opened to $90.8 million domestically and earned another $171 million overseas. What are your thoughts on this result?

Jason Barney: The budget for this project was massive but the opening weekend has pretty much calmed any fears. X-Men is going to do just fine at the domestic box office and the international numbers are going to be big. With a reported $200 million budget, there had to have been concerns from the outset. Fox probably became more and more comfortable as they saw how red hot the box office has become over the last couple of weeks. Going into Memorial Day weekend, it just became a matter of how big the opening was going to be. Sure, the drop next week will be noticeable, but the reviews are surprisingly good, and I would expect strong holds in weekends three and four.

Bruce Hall: This is excellent, with one reservation. X-Men: DOFP erased the stench of X3 in almost every way except at the box office, taking a close franchise second place only to Brett Ratner's widely hated abomination. Somehow that just doesn't seem fair. Still, even though Fox tried to gamely lowball their expectations (come on guys, you gave us a release date for the sequel last December), this is about the result I believe most people were expecting.

The X-Men have never been more popular except, it appears, when Brett Ratner was in command. I'm having a little trouble accepting that.

Edwin Davies: I'd say that this was a pretty excellent result, even if it also highlights just how much momentum the franchise regained with First Class. Even though that installment didn't do great business compared to the other films in the franchise, it did remind people that you could make a decent film out of the X-Men and really ignited interest for a take on one of the most iconic stories the comics ever told. The return of Bryan Singer also probably helped get a lot of people on board who had drifted away from the franchise after he left to make Superman Returns and let Brett Ratner mess everything up, a situation which ended up pleasing almost no one. Still, the fact that it shot under The Last Stand despite eight years of inflation and the addition of 3D surcharges suggests that the series is still trying to make back lost ground.

Tim Briody: Once again we see the value of giving back a few bucks with a reboot. It really pays off when it comes to the next film. This is fine even if Hugh Jackman is starting to get a little old to pull off Wolverine.

Max Braden: I don't think I can get on board with "excellent." For an ensemble film in the franchise, tying together both the original cast and new cast members, I would have expected to have seen over $100 million, if not tens of millions more. It's a movie I do want to see, but I wasn't rushing out to see it this weekend because of two elements in the trailer: the Sentinels looked to me like amateurish CGI and too reminiscent of the drones in Iron Man 2, and despite all the fantastic sci-fi of the X-Men, including mind reading and teleportation, I'm never really keen on time travel (except in Back to the Future and romances like About Time). It just seems like a cheat or a crutch. I'm also far more interested in how the X-Men blend into contemporary society, rather than how they run around on some post-apocalyptic landscape set in the future. On the other hand, time travel does help bring in the young and old versions of the main characters as well as involve newer cast members, which had to be one of the major draws for audiences. The other scene that caught my attention was the big knife about to go into Storm's back. Aside from some evil satisfaction at the potential demise of one of my least liked characters, the bait of "which main characters will die?" is always a strong attraction for audiences, which is why episodic TV dramas use it every sweeps season.

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