This week's genre movie release is a lot more family friendly than last week's Watchman movie. It's Disney's effort to kickstart its Witch Mountain franchise with a movie called Race to Witch Mountain. It's not exactly a sequel to the previous movies in the series and it isn't exactly a remake. It's somewhere in the middle.

The reviews have not been great, but by the time the box office cash and DVD sales are tallied up, I'll bet it makes a lot more money than Watchman does, just for the fact that it's rated G where Watchman is a restricted movie which automatically cuts into its box office potential.

Of course, I'm comparing apples to oranges since the movies have just about zero similarity other than I'm lumping them together as "genre" movies.

What's interesting about Watchman was to see how it would fare with a mainstream audiences compared to the fanboys who worshipped the graphic novel upon which it was based. Apparently, it's not going so well. I think a lot of people were expecting a Spider-Man/Fantastic Four sort of experience, but are finding out it's nothing like that. While it led at the box office last weekend, going forward it doesn't look like it will do so well. I'm guessing its run in the theatres will be relatively brief. Oh, well. It's not like there would be a sequel.

Back to Witch Mountain for a moment. In anticipation of the movie, I hauled out the originals and screened them for my progeny. They both really liked Escape to Witch Mountain, but thought Return from Witch Mountain was not as good, although enjoyed it anyway.  I guess that old Disney magic still holds up after all these decades.