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Reagen Sulewski: In this case, I'm pretty surprised. I didn't think people would have to know much about rugby to care, just to see that it's Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman in a story about Mandela. A serious Best Pic run could take it to the $60 or 70 million mark still.

Sean Collier: The material was clearly very heady and Oscar-focused, and The Blind Side is wrapping up any casual sports fans (and, at the end of the day, Invictus is a sports movie foremost.) The result is nothing to be ashamed of, and the true goal here is gold, not cash.

Jason Lee: I was certainly surprised at how little buzz this film seemed to have going into its opening. Considering that, for me, this was Eastwood's most commercially-accessible film in some time (not centered around racism, WWII, or kidnapping) with a great cast, a feel good story, an iconic real-life political figure, and a sports angle, I certainly thought it'd see a bigger break-out success than $9.1 million.

The Return of the King (of the world)

Kim Hollis: What do you think is the most interesting aspect of Avatar's release this weekend? Any updated thoughts on opening weekend now that we're just a few days from its release?

Josh Spiegel: What's most interesting to me is that, in some ways, Avatar is going exactly along the path of Titanic. Before Titanic was released, there was a lengthy amount of bad buzz surrounding the movie; then, reviews poured in and the tide turned drastically. Avatar hasn't been saddled with the same kind of bad buzz that Titanic had, but after the initial trailers, some people (myself included) thought that the footage didn't seem as impressive as James Cameron made it out to be. But now, in the last few days, reviews have poured in, and they are almost uniformly positive. Of course, I'm still hardpressed to make any solid predictions, but with two-thirds of the theaters this movie is playing in being in 3-D, I'm thinking we might get somewhere near $100 million for the flick.

Max Braden: I agree with Josh, I was not expecting opinion to take a positive swing as we got closer to release. What's also changed is the behind-the-scenes footage we've been seeing in promotional tv spots. While the trailers from this summer looked like all-cgi, it now looks like there's a lot more live action in the movie. That may convince a lot of potential viewers who may have been on the fence about going opening weekend.

Tom Macy: Got my tix for Friday! 1:20 a.m. on IMAX 3-D!!!! I'm most interested to see how a film of this magnitude does with no built-in audience. Today's event films are pretty much exclusively sequels, remakes, or comic book/young adult novel adaptations. Introducing an audience to something for the first time on such a massive scale never happens in today's movie climate. It's only fitting that the director of the biggest film of all-time could is at the helm. The odds seem to be stacked against him, the buzz isn't exactly deafening and the response to trailers seems to have been fairly tepid, considering the hype. But this is the same place we were back in December 1997, so doubters beware. Of course I don't expect a Titanic-like outcome. I don't think blue-humanoid-sea monkeys are as mesmerizing to 14-years old girls as a 22-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio. I just found out the girl I'm seeing now saw Titanic seven times when it came out. Good lord.

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