Doesn't matter: no one inside Building 88 will be horribly embarrassed, which is all the Fox studio execs ensconced there care about. Especially after the pic received a failing grade of only $3.8M when it opened Wednesday in 3,043 venues (when $5+M would have been passable) and -9% for $3.4M Thursday for only a weak $7.2M cume going into today. Yet this is the kind of $117M rom-com ($107M with the Massachusetts tax breaks, split among New Regency, Fox, and Dune) that should have grossed $35+M easy.

Then again, I have rarely seen Hollywood so transfixed on a movie before it opened. But with starry casting, and promotion aplenty, everything about this pic was high-profile -- so a spotlight comes with the territory. (Those stunts for junketing journalists in Spain cost a fortune but translated into media value.) Plus, Fox is the studio Hollywood loves to hate, even more so after the insane success of Avatar, because it regularly takes medium-budget mediocre movies and makes big hits out of them because of killer marketing. Knight And Day should have been no exception. But the media keep gunning for Tom Cruise post-Oprah's couch and wishing him to fail. Cameron Diaz becomes guilty by association because she can't open a movie. And the weeks of poor tracking on this pic so unnerved the studio that it made a big PR deal of sneaking the film last weekend to counter the bad buzz building up.

The truth is that the film does play. Although once classy James Mangold should find different representation for letting him direct this long-in-development-hell drek. The script passed through the hands of 9 writers as well as Mangold who did an uncredited polish. (At one point titled Trouble Man And Wichita, and then just Wichita, it was Fox film boss Tom Rothman who came up with the treacly Knight And Day.) For that matter, I don't understand why Cruise did the movie either, especially when he had so many better bake-off options back in February 2009. Like The Tourist, now starring Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. Back then it would have paired Tom Cruise with Charlize Theron and put him back with Valkyriescribe Chris McQuarrie. But I digress.

I'm told test screenings were troubled, with audiences cruelly complaining that Tom Cruise is "weird" and Cameron Diaz is "old". And yet Tom Rothman and Emma Watts were buoyed that they got the pair for bargain basement prices, especially since Tom is still a huge star internationally. Indeed, early numbers coming in from abroad show the movie doing "very well" in those few territories it opened day and date, Fox insiders tell me. It debuted #1 in Hong Kong, Jamaica, Thailand, and Trinidad. The Korean opening "is the same as Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which is in line with other movies that have done more than $200 million internationally," a Fox exec told me Friday night.

The public may pile on Cruise for the movie's domestic underplay, but Hollywood thinks responsibility lies with Tony Sella's and Pam Levine's marketing suckfest. The one-sheet graphic didn't even show the stars' faces, the trailers "made the movie look a USA Network TV show", to quote one rival maven, and the lame line that it's "Tom Cruise at his Jerry Maguire best" compares apples to oranges. On the other hand, I hear Rothman micromanaged the movie down to approving publicity stills, while Cruise pushed to have the pic sold as Mission Impossible 4. I can't wait for The Blame Game to be played on Monday morning because there's plenty to go around.

This colossal failure's seismic drop, -74%, from even last Friday's tragic opening, is the sort of humilitainment that Hollywood loves. Problem is, this total writeoff's $100+M losses will eat into the profits that Chris Nolan's Inception will make for the studio this summer. Warner Bros' Alan Horn, Jeff Robinov, Greg Silverman, and DC Comics' Paul Levitz, Gregory Noveck, and Dan DiDio have a lot of explaining to do. I can't just shove this one under the rug, fellas.