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Felix Quinonez: I think this is a really bad opening for Aloha. With the star power alone, it should have gotten close to $20 million and I believe it could have if they had put out an even halfway interesting trailer. I consider myself a big Cameron Crowe fan and I give him the benefit of doubt, but even I thought the trailers were terrible. I wanted to see the movie simply because Crowe directed it but the trailers put me on the fence and the abysmal reviews were the last nail on that coffin for me.

Michael Lynderey: As some critics have noted, Aloha is an iteration of Elizabethtown, and it's basically going down the same road at the box office. Movies such as this - big-star drama/comedies with exotic and inviting locations - can do gangbuster business over the summer, and Aloha could have, too, especially with Bradley Cooper, who certainly ought to be on anyone's list of the top five male movie stars of the decade. But as Edwin said, if the reviews aren't there, a movie like Aloha usually ends up as a non-starter. This is also true one way or the other of Tomorrowland, Mad Max, and at this point of just about anything else without a brand name or a brand genre like a disaster movie.

Ryan Kyle: This is a bad start; however an almost $10 million opening on a $37 million budget isn't that big of a disaster, especially for this genre, which tends to be a bit more leggy. However, with the names involved with this project, it really should have debuted to double the size. Age of Adaline even came out a few million ahead than this flick. And while Aloha is packed with stars, it is quite possibly the most social media-adverse lack of A-list actors there are. While the Rock's gigantic following helped boost San Andreas, Aloha didn't receive any support from its non-posting cast, which is what it needed given the negative stink it had surrounding the release since the Sony email hack. Debuting the first eight minutes of the film on YouTube was an interesting marketing strategy, but it was too little, too late for Aloha. Next week's drop will indicate if Aloha will sink to a low-$20 million finish or a more relieving final cume in the $30 million range.

Max Braden: Given the pounding Aloha took from reviews on Friday, I think Sony should count its lucky stars that this movie managed to pull in double digits over the weekend. Maybe the crowd was aroused by the pile on and wanted to go see the trainwreck for themselves? What never ceases to amaze me is that you can take two huge stars (Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence) put them in a poorly reviewed limited release drama (Serena, still in theaters) and it struggles to gain any attention even from the film festival circuit crowd (less than $,2000 per screen on its opening weekend). But take a handful of fan favorites - Cooper/Stone/McAdams/Murray/Crowe - and add them to a nice but nondescript dramedy, with equally lousy reviews, and it can draw 100 times as much box office as the small film. Should a movie like this with great reviews earn $20 million opening weekend? I'm not so sure; it's not a straight up comedy. But then The Descendants (which I may be comparing simply because of Hawaii) can earn $41,000 per screen its opening weekend and go on to wide release and gross $82 million. Is the movie quality really that vastly different? The numbers make me think the audience is as messed up as Aloha's script. I really wouldn't be surprised if this movie could have earned even more starting in limited release or maybe with a holiday release instead of summer. Still, although I want to point the finger at the audience a bit, Crowe is certainly going to take the fall for this. And that's a long way down from the heights he reached in the public's and critic's eyes during the 1990s.

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