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Angels are the new vampires!

Kim Hollis: Legion, the Screen Gems release about apocalyptic angels, opened to $17.5 million. What do you think of this result?

Josh Spiegel: I think Screen Gems should be thrilled. Of course, I'm saying that with a bit of a bite, as I had to unfortunately suffer through the film this weekend, and it doesn't deserve even half of that take. Obviously, the studio was able to use the apocalyptic cliche to its advantage by making it somewhat about religion, while still putting an emphasis on the bloody action that would follow. Considering that it faced down Avatar, Legion got lucky.

Tom Macy: At first I though it a bit ho-hum, afterall the similarly toned Book of Eli - albeit starring Denzel - earned $30 million last weekend. But that was before I saw Legion's budget of $26 million. Book of Eli cost $80 million. So this is a solid win for Screen Gems. Plus, the theatrical release of Legion is probably just an extended commercial for the DVD release, which I imagine will be even more lucrative.





Shalimar Sahota: I see it as neither great, nor awful. Kind of an expected result for a Screen Gems release in January. I imagine they were expecting a box office #1 with this too, but this is no ordinary month of January.

George Rose: It's definitely a step up after Pandorum for Denis Quaid and more than I expected it to make after the surprise success of last week's The Book of Eli. A few months ago I saw the trailer for Legion and was pretty excited. The story and action seemed appealing enough, and it stars Willa Holland from the fourth season of The O.C. This may not be important to most but every character became my best friend during that final season, mainly because the death of Mischa Barton's character revived that show to its early first-season glory. I never thought I'd see Willa again and now here she is in a Hollywood hit! $18 million is a good result, all things considered, and is more than enough to help put my little Willa on the map. It probably could have made $25 million if it opened a little further away from Eli, maybe as counter-programming to the onslaught of rom-coms around Valentine's Day, but asking for that from the Hollywood Gods would be a waste of my time. They never listen to me anyway and would likely do the opposite just to spite me for asking. The fact that Avatar is still at #1 is proof of that.

Michael Lynderey: That Legion number is an excellent B-movie opener, and the studio should be pretty happy. I'm not surprised that this one's doing better than Daybreakers - the Legion trailer looked a little livelier, if not quite as quality-driven, and so you've got that extra million on Friday over Daybreakers right there. In general, January is one of the top three months for horror (along with August and October); January 2009 had four horror films, and they all did pretty well, so when you scale that number down to two, what's left is probably going to reap the benefits by default alone - and that's exactly what Legion did.

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