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Kim Hollis: Whether you agree with them or not, most media reports are describing Straight Outta Compton as over-performing. Where does Straight Outta Compton rank amongst 2015 box office surprises/successes?

Jason Barney: I think we will have to wait and see until the end of its run. At this point it is one of the true surprises. I don't think it is up there with Jurassic World, but it’s big.

Edwin Davies: I don't think it was a completely out of the blue success because the film had a lot going for it, but the extent to which it has caught on with audiences thus far says a lot about what can happen when quality and a strong subject matter are boosted by something harder to predict like social relevance. I would say that it was not as big a surprise as the success of Jurassic World or American Sniper, which both blew away even the most positive expectations, but in the same ball park as Fifty Shades of Grey, in that a film which looked like it could do well exceeded expectations by a decent, but not impossible, margin.

Felix Quinonez: I definitely think it's a very big surprise. And if it holds up well, I believe, it could be among some of the year's biggest box office stories.

Ben Gruchow: Again, I parrot Edwin. It's going to fare no worse than Fifty Shades of Grey in terms of what it opened to relative to expectations, and it'll almost certainly close with a higher opening-to-total multiplier. Its Friday-to-Sunday declines were slightly higher than those of Pitch Perfect 2, and it's far better-reviewed than that, so it may turn out being more impressive as a surprise success than either of the two films.

Kim Hollis: I don’t know that I rank this that highly on the list of surprises. It’s a story that keeps being told again and again – as studios do more and more micro-targeting toward demographics, they’re finding more and more successes. Because these films become “events,” they all tend to break out to some degree and surprise us. Straight Outta Compton was tracking for $40 million ahead of its release, and tracking has been pretty notoriously low this year for potential surprise films. I’d say this was a mild surprise but don’t really like what it says about the media that we’re all so surprised by it.

Ryan Kyle: This will end up in many year-end recaps as a success story, but I wouldn't rank it above Pitch Perfect 2, Furious 7, and Jurassic World, which are all, of course, from Universal. Maybe I am the only one thinking since mid-July when the marketing campaign started hitting its stride that it would open between $40-50 million, so I am a little jaded to the shock of the opening, but it is still an extraordinary amount. It’s within the same vicinity of films like Ant-Man, Mission: Impossible 5, and San Andreas. That’s pretty terrific for a music biopic, where the previous high mark was $22.3 million for Walk the Line back in '05.

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