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Kim Hollis: Seth MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West earned $16.8 million - less than his last film, Ted, managed on its first day. What happened here?

Edwin Davies: Where to begin? Probably the earliest miscalculation was the genre; Westerns in general are very hit and miss, and while you'll occasionally get a True Grit or Django Unchained, most tend not to do well (though, in fairness, most modern Westerns are aimed at a smaller, art house audience). That presents a double problem for a Western comedy because if people have shown a disinterest in the genre, that makes them unlikely to want to watch anything Western-related, but it also means that people won't be familiar enough with (or sick of) the tropes to want to see them mocked. Westerns also skew older since most fans of the genre are people who grew up when it was more prevalent, while MacFarlane's humor is aimed at younger audiences. You end up with a Catch-22 situation where the people who like Westerns will be put off by the snarky, raunchy tone and the people who like that snarky, raunchy tone will be put off by the Western trappings.

The biggest problem, though, was MacFarlane's decision to cast himself as the lead. While his voice work was central to the appeal of Ted, that film's success was as much down to the presence of Mark Wahlberg, both to anchor the film's craziness and to provide a face that audiences know. (It also helped that it had a clear story that came across easily in the trailers, something you could not say about A Million Ways to Die in the West, which looked scattershot and unfocused from the very first trailer.)

Even in the ads MacFarlane looked stiff, awkward and out of place, and it seemed like an act of vanity to cast himself in the lead when he has relatively little on-camera experience and the audience has no prior relationship to him as an actor. It also doesn't help that most people probably know his face best from his stint hosting the Oscars, which was met with very mixed reviews, and he's coming off the disaster that was the utterly reviled sitcom Dads. Basically, it's been a bad year and a bit for the MacFarlane brand, and animosity towards him seemed to peak over this weekend.

Speaking of reviews; they were TERRIBLE. Comedies benefit from good reviews more than most genres, but especially in instances where a film has a strange premise or a lot of unknown variables - like, say, a lead actor who has never headlined a film before - that might make people on the fence hold back and see what the response is like. Apparently, what people read and heard wasn't strong enough to make them think it was worth the risk.

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