Why this movie failed commercially
I went through pretty much the exact scenario faced by Bob Walker. One day in November 2008 I was called up to the boardroom at 5PM. I had just helped close a huge deal (as in $2BN in financing) the day before. I was doing "extra" work on tracking the debt market breakdown for partners at my firm. I thought I was pretty safe, then I was given a few boxes and told to pack my stuff and not come back on Monday.
Everything in this movie was completely plausible. Fortunately for my family, my wife's income was able to bridge the gap left between my lost income and our obligations, although three years later we still are no where near where we expected to be financially, nor are we "catching up". The complexity of the issues faced by people in this situation cannot be easily encapsulated into a simple formula - real estate pricing patterns, aggressive home financing, the cost of investing in "image" to attract business success, college costs, wage disparities, low-balling offers, unethical disregard by employers of personal sacrifice.
There were some stretches in this film, all of which seemed aimed at keeping it heading in the direction of an audience-acceptable ending.
The VP who is constantly trying to stick up for the employees... he would have been mothballed a long time ago - this guy is not just a dinosaur in the modern business world, he's totally extinct.
The sales manger's suicide driving the film toward a "turning point" funeral - seems to fit but in fact someone in his position is better situated to "readjust" to early retirement/underemployment than a 30-ish up-and-comer. These guys bought into the housing marked long enough ago not to have lost their shirt in the housing bubble burst. As of now, places like Brown are still offering guaranteed financial aid and deferred enrollment is always an option. They are close enough to medicare/social security age that even a few years working as the checker at Home Depot basically for minimum wage and health-care benefits won't substantially derail where they were heading.
And the six-figure sales rep who gets cut early in his career, while probably being over-leveraged to an extreme (but not implausible level) to keep pacing of his downfall at an interesting level, most certainly had a bigger safety net of local family than most young professionals who migrate to places like New York and Boston for the high paying jobs, and probably don't have anyone to fall back on to even babysit their kids while they go to a job interview, let alone that they can move in with or who will give them a job on a contract that is already close to breaking even.
That said, even with those stretches, the film was emotionally satisfying to watch for me. But people in my situation aren't going to step out to watch their lowest personal moments play out in a theater with dozens of strangers. The promoters of this film should have realized the way to sell this realism to the people who experienced it comes in the DVD / home viewing stage. Nor is a tagline like "the wrong guys just got fired" going to bring them out to the theater. It took some courage to tackle this subject matter head on, and not in some "fairy tale romance" way like Larry Crown. For that I thank the producers.