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People just don't appreciate tap dance the way they should.

Kim Hollis: Happy Feet Two was no Happy Feet, opening far short of the original's $41.5 million with only $21.2 million this weekend. What do you feel was lacking with the sequel to lead to this disappointing result?

Bruce Hall: I am sure there are more scientific explanations available, but I think I might be hearing a lot of the same things I heard after Cars 2. I hear talk of an uninspired film with a paint by numbers story, halfhearted social message, confusing, irrelevant philosophical overtones and a cast of adorable wisecracking Christmas toys plodding around obediently like the digital puppets they are. Just as with Cars 2, kids probably don't know enough to hate it but they might be incredibly bored with it. Parents meanwhile, are wise enough to tell their friends to find something else to do with their kids this weekend. Which reminds me, I'd attempt to suggest that Puss n Boots is still a factor here, as it's holding up admirably over its fourth week of release. If you've avoided taking the kids to the theater for a while because it costs so damn much, and your neighbor just told you how much Happy Feet Two sucked, what might you do?

But realistically, I suppose a busy mom could just leave the kids with a sitter and go see Twilight with her girlfriends. Don't think this didn't happen plenty over the last 36 hours.

Jim Van Nest: If you ask me, Happy Feet Two is the winner of the "Really? Did this REALLY need a sequel?" award for 2011. No one wanted it. No one asked for it. And as a result, no one showed up. Then again, Mr. Popper's Penguins also tanked this summer...maybe people are just done with movies about penguins.

Reagen Sulewski: This is a case where being too cynical hurt me. Those ads were dismal, miserable, but thanks to my low opinion of the franchise in general, I didn't think fans would care. Turns out they did.

Edwin Davies: I can only assume that someone put a curse on all the animated films released in 2006 so that, no matter how successful they were, all of their sequels would perform poorly. Truly, they are the Nightmare on Elm Street of movies.

This result is down to the large (for a kids' film) gap between the first and second installments and the poor quality of the resulting product. The kids who loved the first Happy Feet are now all too old for the sequel, and it's hardly as if the first one has become an acknowledged classic in the way that the Toy Story films had before Toy Story 3 came out so there wasn't a second wave of kids coming up clamoring to see the sequel, especially when Puss In Boots has had the family market all to itself over the last few weeks, so any families who only make one or two trips a month probably saw that and decided they were good. Also, with The Muppets coming out next week, people may have decided that it was worth waiting for a family film that's getting nothing but good reviews, rather than watching something that everyone says is, at best, mediocre.

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