The common assessment was that Doug Liman and Tom Cruise‘s Edge of Tomorrow is an inventive, highly diverting Groundhog Day-meets-D-Day-meets-Starship Troopers, and that it would do bang-up business. Clearly a huge hit waiting to happen, or at least a pretty big one. But it did only moderately well. It didn’t quite top $30 million and therefore came in third behind The Fault In Our Stars ($48 million) and Malificient ($33 million). (The upside is that Edge did $82 million overseas.) Boxoffice Mojo reported that Edge‘s Friday tally of $10.7 million “was lower than Cruise’s last movie Oblivion ($13.3 million) and last August’s Elysium ($11.1 million).” It doesn’t figure. Will it have stronger legs than Stars and manage a bounce-back next weekend? Did a portion of the potential audience believe that Edge might be too similar to Oblivion (futuristic battle scenarios) and figured it was just more of the same? Or has something happened to the Cruise brand? I only know this was unexpected and in fact feels like a bit of a shocker.