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We're anxiously awaiting Oliver Stone's Oliver Stone.

Kim Hollis: Oliver Stone's ultra-violent Savages opened to $16 million. What do you think of this result?

David Mumpower: This is right in line with other recent Oliver Stone movies such as Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps ($19 million), W. ($10.5 million), World Trade Center ($18.7 million) and Alexander ($13.7 million, also one of the biggest bombs of the 2000s). The average of his four previous releases in the 2000s is $15.5 million, so $16 million feels fairly predictable. The key difference here is that this movie is a successor of sorts to Stone's 1994 work, Natural Born Killers, in that Savages is specifically named to identify its nature. Critical reception has been mixed with the movie being narrowly fresh among top critics at Rotten Tomatoes (60% as I type this), but the aspect that interests me is how divisive the trailers have been. My wife and I almost always agree on movie advertising yet when she watched the Savages commercials, she threw her hands up in the air in frustration. I thought it looked phenomenal. I've seen the same reactions mirrored across the Internet as consumers run to diametrically opposed extremes, and I believe its opening weekend reflects at least some curiosity about who is right.

Reagen Sulewski: I don't think you have to appeal to a huge number of people with a film like this, so if you target well to people who are thinking "why don't they make films like True Romance anymore," you can build a sizable niche audience. A film like this is going to be divisive by nature, but the ad campaign did a great job of highlighting the type of film it was going to be, and hitting the big name cameos. I found it amusing that you would barely even know Aaron Johnson was in this film from the ads.

Felix Quinonez: I think judging by the type of movie it is, the time of year it was released in and the fact that it didn't get great reviews, its opening is pretty respectable. And when you add in the fact that it didn't have a huge budget (I think $45 million) it should do fine when all is said and done.

Matthew Huntley: I'd have to agree with Felix on this. Universal took a big risk by opening Savages against Spider-Man, but they did okay in a manner of speaking, and even if the film shows fair to poor legs (averaging 45-50% drop-offs on a week-to-week basis), I think it should have enough gas in it to get to $40-45 million and will shine brighter on DVD/Blu-ray/cable. July did not seem like the prime time to release a movie of this nature; I think September-October would have treated it better (which, coincidentally, is when Wall Street and W. opened). I think then the movie could have garnered another $3-4 million when it had more moviegoers' attention.

Jim Van Nest: I'm not sure you could expect a whole lot more from an ultra-violent film like this that let everyone know through its ads, "Hey...this is an ultra-violent film." The market for such a film is only so big and I think this did pretty well considering.

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