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Meanwhile, Walden's partnership with Disney on the Narnia movies seems intact, with Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third film in the series, slated for release in May 2010. But even that's not a guaranteed blockbuster, since Prince Caspian was widely regarded as something of an underperformer this year.

if David Poland's prediction that the "end of Fox Walden is "inevitable" is true, will Walden survive apart from Fox? Who knows.

For what it's worth, the box-office failure of City of Ember should probably also be seen in the light of what Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times has described as "the Fox bad movie streak."

"I've been keeping track of all the awful movies released by 20th Century Fox, the one studio in town that seems to actually pride itself on its ability to avoid using A-list talent and successfully market dim-bulb movies," Goldstein wrote last week. "Putting aside last spring's Horton Hears a Who, Fox has released 21 movies since the July 27 [2007] opening of The Simpsons Movie. Of those 21, none has managed to even score a mediocre 50 at Rotten Tomatoes, the Web's leading aggregator of movie reviews … Now the streak has reached 22 [with] City of Ember."

To be fair, Fox has managed to make a bit of money here and there, despite a generally agreed-upon lack of quality; the phenomenal success of last year's Alvin and the Chipmunks caught everyone by surprise, for example.

But consider this: Prince Caspian was originally going to open in December, around the same time as Alvin and the Chipmunks, but then Walden decided to put it off until the summer, to make room for The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, which was also produced by Walden, and which came out on Christmas Day. The end result? The Water Horse didn't make all that much money, and Prince Caspian's mediocre box-office performance was blamed on a crowded summer market. And Alvin and the Chipmunks had the holiday-season family-movie audience pretty much all to itself.

So Walden, by bumping its Disney movie out of the way of a non-Walden Fox movie, may have helped Fox to make more money than it expected to. But Walden itself didn't reap all that many benefits, and the movies that Walden has made for Fox since then continue to disappoint.

Adapted from a posting at Chattaway's blog, FilmChat.

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