The results are in: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs made $30,304,648 in its opening weekend according to Box Office Mojo. That put it in the number one slot for last weekend, with nearly three times the earnings of the second place film, The Informant. The current Tomatometer rating is 84% positive out of 97% total. Rotten Tomatoes now includes an “average rating” feature, which is a more useful metric to me, and Cloudy has an average rating of 7.2/10.

So how did I do? Put briefly, I correctly called the box office placement (#1 or #2, I said). I underestimated the positive critical response, but not by a whole lot. Numerically speaking, my first prediction turned out to be pretty close when put to the test.

Nevertheless, I feel like I bombed it. Box office aside, my personal predictions for the movie placed it firmly in the realm of mediocre animated fare like Madagascar 2 or Robots — pretty to look at, but not very entertaining overall. A sampling of blurbs from the reviews (“delightful and hilarious,” “wonderfully inspired,” “pure fun, start to finish”) reveals attitude of “pleasantly surprised” from many of the critics.

I also assumed that the relatively bland animation featured in the trailer was representative of the entire movie’s style. I’m not going to try it. Let’s give it to John K. (creator of Ren & Stimpy). He won’t like it — he hates everything… he likes it! Hey Johnny!

Nothing surprised me more than a positive review from John K. The man has not had anything positive to say about an animated feature since, well, I can’t remember him every giving a positive review to an animated feature. His review isn’t completely glowing. He thinks the story is bland and pointless and the character design is mostly uninspired. But the fact that John K., professional animation curmudgeon, was moved to write an article for his blog to say (I’m paraphrasing) “I’m as surprised as anyone, but this movie is much better than the trailer would lead you to believe” — that completely blew me away.

So I consider this a lesson, and a necessary stepping stone in my path towards accurate trailer prediction. Sure, I could say that the trailer gave a poor representation of the movie as a whole, and that’s true. But that’s exactly the point of this feature. My job is to use my experience, research, and instinct to see past the trailer itself and find the real movie hidden behind it. This time, I let my cynicism get the better of me, and I made too many assumptions based on other movies from other studios. In the future, I’ll do well to remember that feature animation is a rapidly changing scene, and fresh blood and fresh ideas can generate a great product from a historically lackluster studio (see Horton Hears a Who! and Kung Fu Panda).

There is one prediction remaining from my original article: that Cloudy will drop below #3 by its third weekend. That’s a softball, though, and it won’t be much of a victory if I get it right. What really interests me is the movie’s second-weekend results. All of this positive word of mouth could drive the doubters (like me) into the theaters to see what all the fuss is about.