In Contention

Tag: Planet 51

  • SUNDAY CENTS: ‘Twilight’ning strikes again!

    The Twilight Saga: New Moon*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    Well, that happened.

    “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” proved the franchise was no one-hit wonder by opening with $140.7 million over the weekend, breaking numerous records in the process. The $72.7 million pulled in on Friday is a new single day record, leaving “The Dark Knight” in the dust.

    The November opening weekend record of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” is disintegrated. The two days Chris Weitz’s film took to reach $100 million equals the fastest on record. The weekend figure is the fifth-biggest debut of all time and the per-theater average is the fourth-best for a film on over 4,000 screens.

    All that is to say that the “Twilight” franchise has now aligned itself with the biggest and brightest of all box office stars. Any conversation that includes Batman, Spider-Man and Jack Sparrow must now include Bella and Edward.

    (more…)

  • FRIDAY FORECAST: Bad ‘Moon’ rising

    Taylor Lautner in The Twilight Saga: New Moon*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    It’s Edward and Bella’s world and we’re just living in it. The film to beat for the Holiday season is “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” and fans finally got their chance to lay eyes on it tonight at midnight. Twi-hards have been lining up and breaking advance ticket sales records on Fandango so there’s no question that the film will be big. But how big?

    The original film opened just 52 weeks ago and earned a surprisingly huge $69.6 million. Prognosticators knew that the book had fans but there was little evidence to suggest a figure that size, particularly because new distribution outfit Summit Entertainment was the studio putting it out. The $36 million it took in on opening day was the 17th biggest Friday ever and represented more than half of the weekend take. If the fanboy rush was that big for the original, you can imagine how frontloaded the sequel is going to be.

    Some sort of record will probably be broken this weekend as the film unloads on a massive 4,024 screens nationwide with round-the-clock showtimes. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” is the current November opening weekend champ at $115 million and that isn’t totally out of the question. Neither is the $67.2 million opening day record by “The Dark Knight” completely safe, although I’m not quite bold enough to predict that big a Friday for Chriz Weitz’s film.

    (more…)