I REMEMBER a conversation I had with my friend John Podhoretz last March about the movie “Pearl Harbor.” I proposed that based on the early evidence, “Pearl Harbor” would have the biggest opening weekend in box office history and might well wind up the fourth or fifth highest-grossing movie ever. “Not if it stinks,” he said. I trotted out all of the circumstantial evidence I could muster on behalf of Michael Bay’s World War II epic: Memorial Day launch, PG-13 rating, romance for the teenage girls, explosions for the teenage boys, historical subject matter for the adults, and an advertising budget big enough to finance a medium-sized ballpark. It didn’t matter whether “Pearl Harbor” was any good, I insisted, because it’s the most perfect focus-group movie ever made.

Not for the first time, Podhoretz was right and I was wrong. “Pearl Harbor” was a stinker, and people knew it. While it had a large opening weekend, it wasn’t mammoth. Instead of making the $400 million or so needed to break the top five list of money-makers, it is still struggling to break $200 million.