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Practice your evil laugh...

Kim Hollis: Megamind opened to $46 million, a slight uptick from How to Train Your Dragon, but not as strong as previous DreamWorks Animation results. Should the studio be satisfied with this result?

Josh Spiegel: I'm going to say yes, while also continuing to be baffled by a world where any online entertainment site can put the word "middling" in the same breath as $46 million. This is DreamWorks' seventh-highest-grossing opening weekend, but fourth if you take out the Shrek sequels. I'll say that I'd be shocked if Megamind had anywhere near the legs that How to Train Your Dragon had, but the opening is impressive considering that the marketing almost went out of its way to not entice children. Having Will Ferrell, Jonah Hill, and Tina Fey in a movie is a good way to intrigue me, but are there a lot of kids who were dying to hear Liz Lemon in a cartoon? I doubt it. That makes this number pretty solid to me.

Bruce Hall: Most consumers are very "new release" oriented, so when you look at what other family oriented offerings there were this weekend you come up with....not much. Megamind might have opened a little better, but since the feedback I have been hearing is somewhat..."mixed"...let's say that just shy of fifty million is an adequate, if not spectacular opening. Considering the talent involved, I'd almost say Megamind was more meant to appeal to People With Children than it was Children, per se.





Being an adult, I am sort of at the saturation point with Will Ferrell, Tina Fey and Jonah Hill. I know that I am not the only one, either. So although I have a feeling this one ends up in the bargain bin sooner rather than later, It is hard to say (let's just call it fifty) million is altogether a disappointment. If my job were hypothetically dependent on the performance of this film, I think I am sleeping well tonight.

Tim Briody: This is fine. I would even wager that, as John mentioned in the wrap, we can look for its weekly decline next weekend to be lower than you think.

Matthew Huntley: I would say they should not be satisfied. Here are my reasons: the production budget and P&A costs for this movie were rather large (reportedly $130 million for production alone); the movie opened at a saturation level (nearly 4,000 theaters); the movie was presented in 3D. The latter two should have upped the opening by at least $13-$15 million, especially for this time of year, but it doesn't look like audiences were biting. Maybe they've grown tired of the self-referential/self-deprecating humor of Will Ferrell and Tina Fey, or maybe the premise just didn't seem all that interesting, or maybe they're over the whole 3D craze. I would say the movie has the family audience all to itself for one more weekend (no real direct competition until Harry Potter and then Tangled after that), but I'm not convinced we can call Megamind a bona fide hit until it has made at least $300 million in total grosses (which will likely happen on the international scene).

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