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Jason Barney: This is an AWFUL result and will go down as one of the biggest bombs of the summer, if not the year. I did a little research on the budget required to bring this to theaters, and it looks like it was somewhere in the $60 million range. That isn't too bad, except this opening is scary bad. It is almost incomprehensible that a film that cost so much could fall so far short of expectations out of the gate. This is a really bad opening.

Edwin Davies: I thought going into the weekend that Sin City: A Dame to Kill For would do badly for a lot of the reasons mentioned - the long gap between sequels, the lack of novelty in the visuals - and others that haven't - namely that it got horrendous reviews, whereas the original was pretty well received - but not THIS badly. This is really staggering, especially when you consider what a hit the first film was both in theaters and on home media.

I think the long wait between sequels was the main problem here, as it was for Rodriguez's previous attempt to prolong the Spy Kids franchise with a too-late fourth film, though not merely because it took so long. I do think that the sequel would have done much better if it had come out in 2006 or 2007, not merely because it would have capitalized on the goodwill of the original, but also because it would have got ahead of the dozens of stylish comic book adaptations that emerged in Sin City's wake. The visuals of Sin City are still striking, but they're no longer unique, and the marketing never found a strong hook to build the trailers on in the way that the original's advertising was able to focus on the Marv character and his hunt for Goldie's killer.

To compare it to the similarly delayed 300: Rise of an Empire, the latter film had the benefit of being the follow-up to a considerably bigger hit and of being a prequel, which allowed it to tell a similar but distinctly different story. A Dame to Kill For seemed like more of the same, particularly since it brought back characters who had been killed off in the first one, and the anthology structure made it hard to easily distill the plot into the ads.

Felix Quinonez: I think the biggest problem was the ridiculously long time they took to make it. Nine years is a long time for audiences to wait. Realistically, I think they could have actually rebooted the series after such a long break. But also, a lot has changed since the first Sin City hit theaters in 2005. I remember liking that movie a lot and even for me the biggest appeal was the unique visuals. Those visuals are completely tired now. What once felt fresh is now boring and played out. And the marketing effort made it seem like even the studio didn't care about the movie. And when you take the terrible reviews into account, there is pretty much no reason to see this movie.

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