You'd be hard-pressed to think of a less fun place to spend this past Monday morning than the executive suites of Warner Brothers Pictures. Last weekend the studio's Jack the Giant Slayer became Hollywood's latest high-profile misfire, earning a dismal $27 million on a budget reportedly in the neighborhood of $200 million, before marketing expenses.

Sooner or later, into the life of every entertainment executive some flops must fall. But coping with failure in a productive, healthy way is not an automatic instinct in a town where schadenfreude and finger-pointing are more popular than the Super Bowl — for every show-business executive must eventually face the day when he or she has to take the long walk down the studio corridor after their weekend disaster.

We spoke with three who have known those halls and witnessed many walks of shame close up, to find out what it is like in a studio's executive suite in the days after a very bad loss. The picture that emerges is of a town not generally geared toward learning from failure, but where that can, eventually, in fact occur.

Executives A and B, who spoke on condition of anonymity, have each worked in and around multiple studios in their decades of entertainment experience. Mike Medavoy was a cofounder of Orion Pictures and chairman of TriStar Pictures. He serves today as the CEO of Phoenix Pictures.