After a critical mauling the likes of which is usually reserved for Uwe Boll, Michael Bay’s mega-budget sequel “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” opened to the second largest five day opening of all-time behind “The Dark Knight.” Is that surprising? Not really.
The original film is one of only two non-sequels in the last three years to make over $300 million at the box office and was the highest selling DVD of 2007, beating the much-higher profile third films in the “Spider-Man,” “Shrek” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchises. In short, for whatever reason, people loved that film and the two years that passed was short enough to strike while the iron was hot, but long enough to significantly improve effects and get bigger, badder robots on screen for longer.
$112 million for the three days and $201.2 million since opening Wednesday are the official estimates and that is astounding. Word of mouth could be absolutely poisonous and the film would still out-gross the original and collect over a half billion worldwide. This was the blockbuster that summer has been waiting for and it will take less than 10 days to pass “Up” as the highest grossing film of the year so far.
The only other new action came from “My Sister’s Keeper” at number five with $11.8 million. For a cancer drama, that’s a fine start, but a troubling amount of it came from Friday, indicating some kind of fanboy rush. Are there groupies for this book like there are for “Twilight?” Just couldn’t wait to see if they added a cancer-free twist at the end? Very odd.