Let’s start with the facts: Transformers, which opened on Monday night, made $152.5 million domestically over its week-long opening weekend. That’s enough to give Michael Bay’s Ford commercial-with-kissing the record for the best opening week for a non-sequel EVAR; it was not, however, enough to break Spider-man 2’s record for the best July 4th opening weekend gross.

Now on to the spin: At MTV, Transformers “conquered”; at the LA Times and NY Times, it “dominated”. But Canada’s Globe and Mail holds Michael Bay’s film responsible for not being able to halt “the overall domestic box office plunge.” Yes, receipts were down 23 percent from the same weekend last year. Entertainment Weekly calls the fall “inevitable:, but I don’t know where you find inevitability in the statistics. Last year, the second Pirates of the Caribbean film grossed in five days about what it took Transformers seven days to produce. Are we to believe that the two mega-tentapoles were somehow playing on unequal fields?

Meanwhile, Variety called the Transformers bow a “boffo perf” –which is, according to the “slanguage” dictionary, the second-highest praise allowed. Pamela McClintock also notes that while Paramount Vantage’s bizarrely-spun A Mighty Heart screen slash didn’t much help that film, Harvey Weinstein’s slow-and-steady Sicko push is paying off. If Box Office Mojo’s breakdowns are to be believed, Michael Moore’s film is averaging about ten times Heart’s take on about the same number of screens.

Speaking of Box Office Mojo, the data kings are less back-handed than Variety in their assessment of Transformers‘ debut. Their generous writeup notes that the Bay flick “handily scored two minor records: biggest Tuesday daily gross with its $27.9 million opening day and top July 4th gross with Wednesday’s $29.1 million.” The always-thoughtful Brandon Gray pegged Transformers‘ success to a long lineage of disaster-themed July 4 hits.

In recent years, the industry has frequently and successfully associated Independence Day with disaster-themed spectacles from Terminator 2: Judgment Day to Armageddon to War of the Worlds, and Transformers fits that bill…DreamWorks and Paramount took a property of limited cinematic appeal—Transformers: The Movie was a theatrical bust in 1986—and sold it as another end-of-the-world event, bolstered by the visceral wonderment of seeing robots morph in live action settings.

Nikki Finke’s inside sources peg the success to Transformers’ ability to transverse cultural barriers. “The studio says that what is making the big box office difference is African Americans and Latinos flocking to see the film. But especially Latino audiences.” Dénos las robustezas del asesino!