Box Office - 'New Moon' Crosses $200 Million

The downward turn for The Twilight Saga: New Moon was shortlived. The vampire sequel, already one of the year's top ten movies, was upended by The Blind Side on Friday, which indicates to me - based on the way it bounced back - that a lot of kids weren't allowed to leave the house on Thanksgiving. Look at Wednesday's $14 million, Friday's $17.9 million rebound, and Thursday's sub-$10 million output, and you can see one of these things is not like the others. It took Twilight about five months to hit $192 million, its total domestic gross, but New Moon needed only eight days to cross $200 million, the sixth movie this year to do so. You really do have to give Summit a ton of credit for creating such a need and giving the audience what it wants. That's tough to do in any situation, but when you're essentially a start-up studio, you can't afford a Land of the Lost-sized miscalculation. The Blind Side enjoyed a rare occurrence for a wide release, taking in more money on the second Friday than it did on opening day, according to Variety. The holiday had nearly everything to do with that, but it's still not terribly common, and it points to a film that will make gobs of money after the second weekend as opposed to peaking on its first two days in theaters. It did drop to second place, but is surprisingly competitive with New Moon, given the circumstances. The football bio-pic earned over $16 million on Friday after winning Thursday, and will be within a couple days of $100 million after this weekend. The new releases, Old Dogs and Ninja Assassins are fighting for scraps. The Robin Williams-John Travolta comedy made $6.85 million while Ninja slipped out of the top five on what should be the busiest movie day of the five-day weekend, earning $5.7 million. The Fantastic Mr. Fox is slowly gaining steam, but it's not much steam; it did make $3 million yesterday, but at only $6 million so far, there's a lot of work ahead. On all of these movies, I'd fairly certain Friday represents their best days in this frame, and we'll see a big decline across the board on Sunday. That makes predicting what will happen from here a little difficult, because Saturday doesn't technically follow the Friday pattern, since Friday is not a normal day for the box office.

Comments

[Vince]

Again, crazy box office news. I am now pretty sure that "The Blind Side" will make even more money than "The Proposal" did, which was a far more accessible and marketable movie released at a time where it had no competition. If it hold up well again next week, this thing could come close to $200 million- no sports movie has ever done that.

Otherwise, everything's doing about as well as expected- "Christmas Carol" got a bump, "Fantastic Mr. Fox" isn't doing as well as it should (and could) be doing and "Old Dogs" is another disappointment for Disney.