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Sunday
22Nov2009

Box Office - 'New Moon' Third-Biggest Weekend Ever

DateSunday, November 22, 2009 at 10:35AM
The Twilight Saga: New Moon put together a $140 million weekend, according to estimates, and that's the third-best opening in history. Only The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3 have better numbers, but considering what the expectations were, it's a ridiculous amount of money.

The film is already number 15 for the year, and has made 73% of last year's $192 million for Twilight. Sequels to successful films usually do better - that's why they make sequels, after all - but this is a massive jump even in that category. We've been keeping our eye on the daily percentages for this movie, and it nearly mirrored Twilight, where the Saturday and Sunday figures are 40% declines from the previous day. Still, maintaining 60% of the Friday audience is $43 million, so that hardly seems like a bad deal.

But New Moon wasn't the only film to throw surprising numbers on the board: The football drama The Blind Side earned a very healthy $34.5 million, almost double what most projections had in store for the Sandra Bullock film. Obviously, it placed second in one of the biggest box office weekends in history. The top 12 movies this weekend earned a whopping $248 million.

2012 fell from first to third, surrendering almost 60% of its first weekend, which was still good for $26.5 million. Three other films made over ten million, including the slow starter Planet 51, A Christmas Carol, and Precious.

The question for New Moon is how much it can make over the long haul. I don't really have a gauge for the series worldwide, but most movies that start this big don't always follow the model of an opening weekend being responsible for roughly one-third of the total gross in the US. Spidey 3 did 45% of its business in weekend one, Shrek the Third, and Pirates 3 were also 37%. So I'll stop well short of saying this film makes over $400 million. But I think it zooms past $200 million next weekend, and should be over $300 million well ahead of the end of the year.

The Top Five:
1 - New Moon ($140.7 million)
2 - The Blind Side ($34.5 million)
3 - 2012 ($26.5 million)
4 - Planet 51 ($12.6 million)
5 - A Christmas Carol ($12.3 million)

AuthorColin Boyd | | in , , , | Print ArticlePrint Article | | CommentPost a Comment |

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