Hi Jason,
The problem is meta boxes are registered and run before any WP query, so all the template functions won't work.
If you're going to get in the back end, then please use this code:
$post_id = false;
if ( isset( $_GET['post'] ) ) {
$post_id = intval( $_GET['post'] );
} elseif ( isset( $_POST['post_ID'] ) ) {
$post_id = intval( $_POST['post_ID'] );
}