The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian easily won the weekend, yet is already being considered a failure. How can this be? The movie made more than $55 million, right? It has received generally good notice, and fans seem to have enjoyed it (except for me, that is), so how can it already be thought of as a failure? Easy. The suits were expecting this to open north of $70 million, and considering it fell short by $20 million, including $10 million shy of the originals open, the warning signs have had an impact on the studio. Following the collapse of Speed Racer last week, the signs for the coming summer season do not look good. Of course, you could always look to the success of Iron Man to gauge the rest of the summer outlook.

Speaking of Iron Man, it took in another $31 million as it cruised by the $200 million mark and has a shot at making the triple-century mark. This is a great example of a quality movie that hit at the right time. The box office was slumping in the weeks leading to its release, so when it arrived movie lovers who were movie starved had something to cheer for. Fortunately, the movie came out firing on all cylinders, thus kicking off a new superhero franchise. The movie really is good and is well deserving of the attention it has received.

There were no other wide releases after Prince Caspian this weekend. This lack of added mid-level competition means the rest of the returning films were alone to duke it out. Overall, the films demonstrated pretty strong holds from last week. That is with the exception of Speed Racer, which is turning out to be a box-office disaster, it fell more than 56% from last week and looks to be making a quick exit from theaters. Warner Brothers will have to look to DVD to attempt to recoup its losses from the theatrical release.