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Jay Barney: I think the franchise is doing just fine. That may change, and maybe we are at a temporary peak, but Fox has to be happy their film anchored the Memorial Day frame this successfully. I had never considered the number of films to be one every two years, and you would think a series with that level of exposure would be suffering a little bit of fatigue. Even if the Wolverine films and the most recent X-Men film haven't performed as highly as the original three, this weekend erases any doubt about the franchise. This is a huge opening and the worldwide take is going to be massive. No, this is not Avengers, but this will not be the last of the X-Men films.

Bruce Hall: Excluding X3, the franchise prior to now averaged a domestic opening weekend of around $66 million. Add in That Which Must Not Be Named and the figure rises to $72 million. While this cannot be ignored, to me it paints a picture of a franchise that is well liked but not necessarily beloved. However the amount of praise this DOFP is getting might signal a reboot not just of the franchise but of the general public's relationship with it.

If they can score a second such success in a row with Apocalypse in 2016, the deal will be sealed.

Edwin Davies: As I hinted in response to the previous question, I think that this represents an improvement in the fortunes of the X-Men franchise while also suggesting that they are still trying to recover from the damage caused by the one-two punch of X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Those films both did decent business but were so bad, and were received with such hostility from audiences, that the two films prior to Days of Future Past felt more like acts of contrition than films. Fox seemed to realize that they had messed up and needed to make amends, and this weekend's result suggests that they have been mostly forgiven, but only mostly.

The series has slipped from being one of the top tier superhero franchises to being somewhere in the middle, but it definitely feels like it is on the upswing with this one, both critically and in terms of domestic and international box office. That last point feels key, to me, because the series has always struggled to match the global impact of the Spider-man films or any of the MCU films, so if it can make huge gains now then that will probably bode well for the future success of the series.

Max Braden: Despite the box office numbers this weekend, I feel like the series is muddled. When the first X-Men opened in 2000, it was the first modern comic book movie and set the stage for everything that has come since. Immediately Wolverine was my favorite of the characters and remained that way for me for years, so I was happy to get more of his backstory. It's hard to say if Origins: Wolverine and The Wolverine had been better if I'd still favor the character, but at this point, and with so much of his material not involving Jean, I feel like his story has dragged on.

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