Poor start for Poseidon

Warner Brothers' first big summer blockbuster didn't make quite the splash the company would have hoped for as it limped in with a measly $20.3 million in its first weekend at the US box office.

Wolfgang Peterson's remake of disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure failed to knock the third installment of Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible off the top of the chart, while the US box office was down 13 per cent overall on last year's attendances.

Poseidon, which stars Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss and Jacinda Barrett, has been panned by critics so far with the Washington Post calling it: "A deeply dreadful movie - no, a shallowly dreadful movie - that's too unpleasant and repetitive to be entertaining," and the Boston Globe no more complimentary with its prognosis, "as much fun as a shroud".

Hope remains for Hollywood executives though with next weekend's release of the Da Vinci Code which is being widely tipped as the blockbuster saviour for this summer.

Poseidon looks like it has a long way to go before delivering a return on its estimated $150 million budget and even further if it's going to rival the popularity of the original, which starred Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine and Roddy McDowell.

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