Last November, we wondered: “Will Audiences Give a Dam About The Beaver?” The answer, based on this weekend’s limited release opening box office, is not really.

While the Mel Gibson drama scored fairly well on RottenTomatoes.com, it likely lost what little chance of success it had by coming out in the midst of Fast Five and Thor. Today, Steven Zeitchik over at LA Times blog “24 Frames” tries to make sense of The Beaver‘s $4,727 per-screen average:

To put that in lay terms, that means that in the markets the Jodie Foster film opened, very few people came out to see it. To put that in other lay terms, the average was lower than that for the recent opening of Atlas Shrugged, a movie so unpopular it prompted its producer to contemplate retirement

Zeitchik also sifts through some earlier comments on the LA Times blog network, recalling how many readers were outraged when it was suggested Gibson might no longer be a viable leading man.