Fearless Forecast - 'Twlight' Eclipses $60 Million

It will be hard for Twilight to match the hype. Ever since Summit Entertainment announced it was moving a smaller teentastic movie into the void left vacant by Harry Potter (which will now open in July), word has been slowly spreading about the film, and as I've maintained all week, I don't believe I can recall the last time a movie like this had its public image peak at such a good time. You'd have to go back to Blair Witch to find an accurate comparison, because like this film, nobody had expectations of being one of the year's bigger hits when they were making Blair Witch. My Big Fat Greek Wedding started its terrific theatrical run very slowly, building over a couple of months, but it didn't have hype when it hit theaters.The wave could have come in at low tide for Twilight because hype has a way of burning out potential audience members. But because it has such fervent followers from the book series, I think most undecided moviegoers really had no clear idea what this movie was until a month or two ago. And now they've seen trailers or magazine covers or news coverage of the frenzied fans, and they've become interested enough - or at least, enough of them have become interested enough - to make this a huge, huge success.I'm excited to see how it plays out, genuinely excited. Summit and Twilight don't have the machines at their disposal that Disney has for Bolt, the new animated movie that until maybe two weeks ago, everyone thought would debut at number one. Bolt will make money, too, but there's no real mystery to it; it's a product from a major studio that the company knows how to push. They use roughly the same model for that as Lilo & Stitch. Twilight is something new under the sun. Or the moon, in this case.Should Twilight perform as well as we believe it will, then we'll have the first back-to-back-to-back $60 million opening weekend set since May 2004. And what's fascinating about that number is how different the audiences are for Madagascar, Quantum of Solace, and Twilight. And just put this projected box office number into perspective when you consider it has a big film opening against it - which the other two did not - it doesn't have the number of automatic ticket sales that Madagascar or Solace has, and because a number of November films have done well and will continue to do well, Twilight faces competition from all sides. And its monumental success will be built from the ground up.The Top Five:1 - Twilight ($66 million)
2 - Bolt ($40 million)
3 - Quantum of Solace ($30 million)
4 - Madagascar ($16 million)
5 - Role Models ($6.5 million) Let's take a look at last week's forecast. The final number for Quantum of Solace was significantly lower than the $70 million estimate given on Sunday. We said $63, and the actual amount split the difference, with $67 million. We ran the top five and were only $1.5 million off the second weekend runs for both Madagascar and Role Models. So it was a real stable week in the fortune teller's den.

Comments

[Faith]

I've been a big Twilight fan for a while now-it's so exciting to see that it's become a movie and that people are speculating it will do so well at the box office!

[Jordan]

Twilight sucks. Really bad, I think the blogs on vampirefreaks.com about the exact same thing are better written than that shit, and that's not me saying those are mediocre writers, even. I hope it bombs so 15 year old girls can obsess over something that could actually be useful to them, rather than stupid generic teeny-books that they think will somehow give them the facade of being even slightly intellectual just because they read a book.

But maybe I'm an asshole...