I’m pretty impressed by the box office success of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, an unrecognizably loose adaptation of my favorite children’s book, which I had last month included in a list of movies that really ruined our childhood. Apparently I was completely wrong in that claim and the movie is supposedly “Pixar good.” Initially I had planned on boycotting the 3-D animated film, but I’m suddenly very much looking forward to seeing it sometime this week.

I’m also now kind of curious about Jennifer’s Body, which came in at an embarrassing fifth place and is now allegedly signaling the end of Megan Fox’s career. Never mind the fact that we film bloggers shouldn’t want this to happen because she’s been such great traffic-bait for us in the past (meaning she’s allowed some of us to get paid for this once in awhile). Is she really to blame for the bomb? Or, is it the Diablo Codyspeak? Or the marketing? Or, is this simply one of those films, like its ancestor, Heathers, that will take some time to find it’s cult audience — which will, by the looks of those rallying for the film, be primarily women?

Let’s see what the film blogs are saying about Jennifer’s Body’s seemed failure after the jump:

• Lindsay Robertson at Vulture sees a future for the film in the long run:
  

  Jennifer’s Body: $6.8 million. Prediction: Even if it doesn’t pick up word-of-mouth steam when holdouts realize it’s a comedy, Jennifer’s Body will be a cult hit on DVD.

• Jenni Miller at Cinematical has faith that the movie will succeed in the end, shares some praise from mostly female supporters as evidence and offers this bit of hope:
  

  Something interesting is happening on the Internet, and that’s a growing rumble of approval from the audience writer Diablo Cody and director Karyn Kusama were hoping to reach: women. And that’s so f—ing cool to me because this strange, unwieldy beast, which has gore but isn’t a horror movie and has hot chicks kissing but for entirely different reasons than you’d think, has been marketed to the typical straight horror movie audience. This isn’t a slam against the marketing folks, either, because times are tough, this movie is a gamble, and how the hell did Heathers did at the box office when it first came out? It went down as easily as a cup of Drano in theaters but gathered steam on DVD.

• Vic Holtreman at ScreenRant witnessed such a gender divide on Twitter discussion of the film that he decided to do “an informal (and very crude) statistical analysis.” His results:
  

  Here’s the breakdown:

  * Male movie reviewers: 39% liked it, 61% disliked it.
  * Female movie reviewers: 54% liked it, 46% disliked it.

  From the male side of the aisle, the negative comments about the film focus on the opinion that while Jennifer’s Body sets out to be both funny and scary, it succeeds at neither. However the film seems to speak more to female critics than to the man side of the aisle based on the focus upon girl/girl friendships, and particularly on showing just how cruel women can be to each other, never mind guys.

• Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere believes the opposite — that women didn’t relate to the film enough:
  

  The conventional wisdom explanation for the failure of Body is that it wasn’t ferociously horrific enough to compete with previous genre standouts, and that women didn’t relate to/didn’t want to see the cruelly competitive relationship between Fox’s Jennifer and Amanda Seyfried’s Needy, or they just don’t like Fox. (Who actually likes her? Big difference between that and being fantasized about.) In any case Cody is much lower on the totem pole this morning than she was a few days ago, Kusama is now a two-time loser in the all-female mass-market genre flick game (this and Aeon Flux) and Fox, dinged last week by an unflattering characterization on Michael Bay’s website, has demonstrated she can’t (a) act or (b) open movies.

• Anne Thompson at Thompson on Hollywood blames the studio for not marketing it well to women:
  

  The studio failed to get women to watch Karyn Kusama and Diablo Cody’s angry feminist movie. Thus Jennifer’s Body is a classic tweener: neither a horror thriller for men, nor a coming-of-age horror-comedy for women.

• Brandon Gray at Box Office Mojo also blames the marketers for thinking guys were the audience for this film:
  

  Ads could have appealed more to females, who have been known to drive horror business, through the picture’s Mean Girls themes or the character played by Amanda Seyfried, who was minimized. What’s more, if Megan Fox is such a fantasy for males, how is it attractive to them to see her as a man-eating demon? Besides, they can get their fix from pictures on the Internet.

• Scott Mendelson at The Huffington Post believes in another kind of gender-based reasoning for why the film failed:
  

  I’ve said this a thousand times and it’s still true today. In general, men will not see a movie that they are otherwise uninterested in just because the girl in it is cute or hot. On the other hand, many women will do this. It’s why James Van Der Beek and Freddie Prinze Jr. had big hits in the spring of 1999 (Varsity Blues and She’s All That) while Sarah Michelle Gellar’s vehicle (Simply Irresistible) flopped. I thought Megan Fox may have been an exception, especially considering the saturation-level PR that she got in the run-up to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. But I was wrong.

• Chad Hartigan at In Contention sees a troubled past for one Fox and a troubled future for another:
  

  Fifth place is where you find the big disappointment of the week in “Jennifer’s Body.”  Fox has failed time and again this year at courting the teenage and young adult crowd and this is yet another example. $6.8 million is frankly, pathetic and less than the debuts of “The Covenant” and “Cursed.”  Do you even remember those movies? I didn’t think so. “Jonah Hex” may delay the inevitable but the game is almost over for Megan Fox.

• Todd at IDontLikeYouInThatWay.com thinks Michael Bay is having a laugh today and offers his reason for why Fox is to blame.
  

  Ok, I give. She’s completely overrated. She’s a hotter Jennifer Aniston who couldn’t carry a movie on her own if she had Hulk arms and a wheelbarrow. But as far as the overrated scale goes, I guess she could be a lot worse. She could be USC.

• Gabe Toro at The Playlist wonders if the soundtrack-based marketing hurt the film:
  

  It’s clear why this failed to find an audience- Megan Fox simply did not talk about Michael Bay enough in interviews. The movie almost seemed like an accessory to its soundtrack in the ads, an approach that seems dated simply because its long stopped working - we think the last time that was effective was, maybe, “The Crow“?

• Dan Hopper at Best Week Ever is either being sarcastic about Fox’s overexposure in the media or claiming she’d have done better had she showed more skin:
  

  Jennifer’s Body earned just $6.8 million at the box office this weekend, placing behind four movies including Love Happens. If only Megan Fox had made herself more visible…

• Vince Mancini at FilmDrunk thinks it was the over-exposure:
  

  Jennifer’s Body barely made more than Sorority Row last weekend, and if I had to guess why, I’d say it probably wasn’t the best idea to play the commercials starring an already over-exposed Megan Fox over and over ad nauseum during football and UFC.  I felt like I’d already seen it 12 times by the time it came out.  You see, we men like variety, isn’t that right, hard drive full of exotic porn.  But then, what do I know, I’m not an analyst.  I’m just a guy who likes cats wearing costumes.  Uh, I mean pussy.

• JoBlo.com thinks Fox’s media appearances hurt the film:
  

  The Megan Fox parade might be ending very soon as well (and maybe even the Diablo Cody one) as her first major starring role in JENNIFER’S BODY, which seems like it’s been talked about for years now, was a major disappointment, opening in 5th place with only about $7M. I’m assuming Fox’s constant bitching about the industry and how she’s this and that, didn’t do her any favors.

• Agent Bedhead hopes Megan Fox will go away now:
  

  While some people will see this as a significant dent in Diablo Cody’s otherwise shiny scriptwriting career, I don’t think Cody is to blame here. Instead, I’m fairly certain that theatergoers are just entirely sick of Megan Fox running her bitchy, unrepentant mouth and acting as if she’s indispensible to the Hollywood machine. Fox had better stop drawing ill-conceived Hitler analogies towards director Michael Bay, because, at this point, she needs him much more than he needs her in his next big-ass-robots movie.

• Ken Tucker at Entertainment Weekly’s Watching TV believes Megan Fox has a brighter future in television:
  

  For millions of people, I’m guessing, Megan Fox is the very definition of a guilty pleasure. And a guilty pleasure is something you enjoy in the privacy of your own home. You don’t go out, drive to a theater, and ask for a ticket to see Jennifer’s Body if you think the person behind the ticket window knows you’re asking for a ticket to see Megan Fox’s body.

• Will Melton at FusedFilm thanks moviegoers for the film’s failure:
  

  Oh, and to the general public, I know that we’ve had our differences in the past (and by that I mean that I typically loathe you and your taste), but you really came through this weekend. Thank you for standing up to the Hollywood PR machine and saying, “Look, we don’t care how hot the girl is. If the movie sucks, then we’re not going to see it.”

• Bill Gibron at PopMatters devotes a post to somewhat blaming Fox for being “merely ordinary,” which only contributed to the film’s weaknesses:
  

  But is it really Fox’s fault? Is her blank persona and centerfold ambiguity really the reason why people failed to flock to this faux fright funny business? Reviewers have been extremely harsh on the Fempire’s CEO for her self-indulgent and conscious screenplay, many suggesting it plays like Diablo Cody parodying a Diablo Cody script. Others point to the flop sweat still streaming off director Karyn Kusama’s career. In a strange sort of cinematic synchronicity, the Girlfight helmer took a true super beauty, Charlize Theron, and almost destroyed her commercial credibility with the groan-inducing live action adaptation of MTV fave Aeon Flux. So with two seeming strikes against it Jennifer’s Body had to have a solid lead to help lift it over some possible problems. It certainly didn’t need Ms. Fox’s inert charms to further undermine the material.

• John at The Movie Blog is surprised anyone thought Fox could carry this movie:
  

  Can this now end the idea that people will line up to see Megan Fox just because she’s hot?

  Not 1 single dollar of The Transformers money came from people going just to see her.

  This career will be short. She’s got a deal right now… but as soon as it’s up, you won’t see her leading a film again.

  Jonah Hex might do ok at the box office… but if it does anything, I hope this weekend proves it won’t be because of her.

  Jennifer’s Body was marketed around Megan Fox. It was all about Megan Fox. It teased us with Fox making out with another girl. It teased us with MAYBE seeing her naked. And yet, still no one went to go see it.

  I don’t think there’s anything left to say really.

• Eugene Novikov at Cinematical believes Megan Fox is the only reason the film made any money at all:
  

  Jennifer’s Body proved more problematic, grossing $6.8 million in fifth. Superstar screenwriter Diablo Cody didn’t make it easy for the folks at Fox, since it must have been difficult to capitalize on the success of Juno while promoting what is at least nominally a horror movie. (Its actual horror bona fides are questionable, but it was really the only way the flick could be pitched.) That left the draw of Megan Fox, which, I suspect, is responsible for a good chunk of what the film managed to rake in.

• Sean at Film Junk blames the taste of mainstream America and its aversion to genre mixing:
  

  Jennifer’s Body ultimately failed to find an audience, collecting just $6.8 million. Is this is the beginning of the Megan Fox backlash, or is this just more evidence that mainstream audiences can’t stand having their horror films mixed with comedy?

• Bob Westall hopes Hollywood doesn’t blame the genre mixing:
  

  In the thirties, “The Bride of Frankenstein” was funny and was a smash hit; in the seventies, “Jaws” was pretty funny; “Scream” was funny and made huge bucks in the nineties.  A horror movie with laughs will do well again, some day, I’m sure. If the studios make a few good ones, that is.

• S.T. VanAirsdale at Movieline has a comprehensive rundown of all that went wrong for the film, though he doesn’t present Megan Fox with much of the blame. Here’s one of the bigger problems he lists that I too noticed:
  

  2. The marketing. Maybe I was looking in the wrong places, but I never saw a single TV spot, billboard, transit poster, lobby standee, or other promotional measure for Jennifer’s Body anywhere in New York. I’m not sure how it went in Los Angeles or any of the other national markets where Body was playing on more than 2,700 screens, but for a film to command so much hype online yet be altogether hidden once people leave their desks seems like something of a lost opportunity. Particularly when people never seemed to know…