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Kim Hollis: Home, the latest CGI animated film from DreamWorks Animation, made $52.1 million this weekend. What do you think of this result?

Jason Barney: I’m going to go out on a limb and say this is a pretty resounding success on a number of fronts. It is hard not to look at the opening weekend in the context of the overall budget, which was pretty steep for a non-franchise opener. $135 million is not cheap. However, this opening of well over $50 million can allow the folks at Fox and DreamWorks to breathe a sigh of relief. At the very least, their project did not bomb.

Home still has a long way to go to be profitable but the map is a lot clearer now than it was just a few days ago. Many of the tracking estimates I saw for this were well below the weekend number, and it points to a ground swell of support by families with kids. I continue to maintain that it is one of the most underserved demographics within the marketplace, and this large opening clearly denotes pent up frustration with the absence of kids’ movies.

Internationally, the film is already doing very well. Its prospects for the next several weekends are great. Home is going to skew younger, so the only semi-competition in that regard is going to be Avengers. Even then…is it me….or does the schedule for kids movies look absolutely dead? Home has a fairly clear lock on any family wanting to go to the movies for a long time.

Brett Ballard-Beach: Jason, it’s true. There are no out and out kids’ movies until Inside Out in June. And this result is fairly flabbergasting. I have heard the "star power" of the voice cast trumpeted but I don't buy into that. I am dumbfounded simply because the trailers made this look like one of the few family movies that have been out since I became a father five years ago, that I have no interest in seeing. It looked cheap and suggested to me an unholy cross-pollination of Lilo & Stitch and Bringing Down the House that came out a decade too late. Listening to Jim Parsons talk in out of date slang for 90 minutes (sans contractions no less) suggests aural torture that the Geneva Convention might need to recognize. I know it has been suggested that Get Hard might have done slightly better than expected because some people wanted to get it out of the way before Furious 7 opens. All I can think is that Home might have benefited as well.

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