A 10.3 box-office assessment piece by Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson reports what was obvious to anyone who visited a plex last night — The Martian is kicking ass while The Walk is going “whoa, whoa…what happened?…shit, I dropped my balancing pole! No, no, no, no….aaagghhhhhhh!” The Robert Zemeckis film opened on 441 IMAX screens to jumpstart word-of-mouth (it doesn’t open big-time until next Friday) but “it’ll be lucky to earn $1.75 million during its first five days,” Mendelson writes. Compare that to the $7.22 million earned by Everest during its opening IMAX engagement. Question for HE readers: what happened to the two conversational points that were supposedly driving interest in The Walk — (1) “You have to see the last 25 minutes!” and (2) “Are you man enough to handle the WTC walk sequence without throwing up?” That whole daredevil-vomiting thing seems to have flatlined. Mendelson: “I’m not sure how helpful it was for we critics to harp on how the first two acts weren’t that great while the third act was a barnburner. Audiences don’t exactly have the option of paying 1/3 of the ticket price to only watch the last act of the film.” Was that a factor, knowing that people like myself were saying that the first four-fifths of the film blows? I still say it’s essential to see The Walk for the last 25 minutes alone.