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Felix Quinonez: I think this is a great result, even when you consider its big budget. The release date was great, the reviews (and word-of-mouth) are very strong so I am confident that it will hold very well in the coming weeks. I think it will definitely top $200 million domestically and do even better overseas. Disney can add another hit to its recent resurgence.

Edwin Davies: The key thing for me in assessing the top two films this weekend is something John Hamann mentioned in the Weekend Wrap-up. This result would be impressive if Big Hero 6 has opened on any other weekend, but it's hugely impressive when you consider that it was fighting for screens with Interstellar and neither film really lost out. If Big Hero 6 or Interstellar had the weekend to themselves, either one could have probably added another $5-10 million to their opening gross (Big Hero 6 would have probably benefited more because it would have had IMAX screens to play with) but coming out now, with the holiday season still ahead, means that they could open big and theoretically hold very well in the weeks ahead. So I'd say that this is a very good opening weekend for Big Hero 6, both because of the reasons that have already been mentioned and the fact it had to share space with another behemoth, but it'll likely set up another great and lengthy run for Disney.

Bruce Hall: On the one hand, I can agree with Big Hero 6 being a pleasant surprise by virtue of its lack of hype. I have kids and have no clue what it is, and this is coming from a guy who knows way too much about the iCarly universe than he should.

When I saw the BH6 trailer ahead of Guardians of the Galaxy, I felt like much of the audience was in the same boat. But the rest of them laughed, because either they'd heard of it before, or because giant balloon people are inherently funny.

Whatever the case I think the film was helped by the fact that the last notable kids' release opened some weeks ago, so I think there was room for this to be successful. I don't see Big Hero 6 and Interstellar cannibalizing a lot of audience from each other, so as far as I'm concerned BH6 had the weekend more or less to itself.

And it will next weekend as well, unless you consider Kirk Cameron a threat. Good word-of-mouth should translate into a good second frame. Word of a sequel should come within weeks. All is well at the Mouse House this morning.

Reagen Sulewski: I commented a bit about this in my forecast, but it's perhaps a bit strange that we're remarking at how well Disney has done to create a new property out of something unknown - isn't that the way it's supposed to work? It's a real sea change from how things used to be in that everything has to be proven in some other media first before being made into a film. If we think about some of the millstone coming up - would Ghostbusters or Back to the Future even get made today in the current film environment?

Now, with as much money riding in the budgets of these films as there are, I understand why they're so risk averse in Hollywood, and it seems weird to be championing this as some sea change when they're just looking at something that just isn't already hugely popular to begin with. But maybe that's my point - we have become so addicted to adaptation that we're not intimately familiar with qualified as innovation. Now, Interstellar really counts for that this weekend, but I see Big Hero 6 lumped in with that too, but it's worth thinking about our attitudes towards film. This is to say nothing of the actual quality of the film, which looks to be a pure expression of cinematic joy.

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