Box Office - 'New Moon' Narrowly Beats 'Blind Side'

Just about any other weekend, $66 million might seem like a powerful number, but pull back a bit and you'll start to see a different kind of writing on the wall. The Twilight Saga: New Moon did win the weekend - but not by much - and that $66 million figure, a steep 64% drop from its debut stanza, is actually the five-day total. Over three days, the sequel only made $42.5 million, which reflects a 70% fall and, symmetrically, a $100 million decline from its opening weekend.

The movie has still earned $230 million in ten days, and that's plenty. But the freebies of a five-day holiday weekend are behind us, and this movie is in a real battle right now with The Blind Side, which nobody saw coming. That probably indicates a rougher road ahead for New Moon than the pic's $142 million start would indicate. Certainly, it looks close to impossible for this to push for a whole lot more than $300 million. Speaking of The Blind Side, it trounced expectations for the five-day session, trailing New Moon by only $9 million. That means outside of Wednesday, when New Moon made $14 million and change, The Blind Side played the teenage vampires about even...in 1,000 fewer theaters. That's terribly impressive. More importantly, the second weekend, five days or not, was much, much stronger than its debut, and as a result, the film has already crossed the $100 million mark.

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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.

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Fearless Forecast: More Millions For 'New Moon'

Expect another big victory for New Moon at the box office this weekend, and in general, expect a strong Thanksgiving five-day frame bolstered by several films. The Twilight sequel will reign again in large part because there's simply nothing else in theaters capable of making about $75 million in five days.

Among the new releases, Old Dogs will probably make the most money. I say probably because it looks like the most vulnerable, as well. In addition to vying for the family audience that might also see Christmas Carol, Planet 51, The Blind Side, and maybe even The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Old Dogs looks like a non-event in a field full of just the opposite. However, at every screening I've attended where the trailer has been shown, Old Dogs gets laughs, so it will certainly have a good weekend, but it will probably be stuck in third place. The Blind Side should repeat as the second-place film, and it might not even lose much of its audience, thanks to the more available holiday crowd. The performance has been something of a surprise and all exit polling indicates this film is a major favorite for moviegoers, so it's sure to get plenty of word-of-mouth activity this weekend.

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Movie Review - 'Ninja Assassin'

Ninja Assassin Starring Rain, Naomie Harris, and Sho Kosugi Directed by James McTeigue Rated R

It's all a little too whiz-bang, but James McTeigue's Ninja Assassin is nevertheless a great hour-and-a-half for action fans steeped in cartoon-inspired violence. McTeigue (V for Vendetta) appears to be midway through a larger story, so it's possible this might strike you as parts one and two of a series, and it may have been better served that way. Still, there's a lack of good, fun, death-defying (and possibly depth-defying) martial arts movies in American theaters, and the few things that Ninja Assassin gets wrong are ultimately forgivable. Ninjas have enjoyed a mysterious ride through history for hundreds of years. McTeigue's film plays on that mythology to introduce a theory that the warriors adapted over time from feudal assassins to modern ones, employed by governments and the enterprising around the world to carry out contract killings for the current price of 100 pounds of gold. Based on the slaughterhouses the ninja seem to leave behind following their killings, it's a wonder the assembled constabularies haven't put the pieces - literal and figurative - together yet. Mob killings are usually gun shots, government killings tend to look accidental, but there's no mistaking a ninja kill for anything else. Vivisected bodies, blood-splattered walls, and a surprising lack of inefficiency, given the killers' reputation for stealth. An investigator for Eurpol (Naomie Harris) finally works it out, however, and begins to link ninjas with political and corporate assassinations stretching back a century or more. Her current case leads her to Raizo (Rain), a rogue member of the Ozunu clan who is out to topple his former master (legendary martial arts actor Sho Kosugi). Obviously, these two threads overlap in a major way. Raizo's backstory is intertwined with the Europol investigation, and that's where the elements of Ninja Assassin begin to feel as though they're independent stories that don't need to share screen time. It isn't ineffective, exactly, but it's doubtful too much of the business generated by this film will stem from a desire to watch a police procedural set in Berlin. The origin story has our attention, and it should. Now if only there was more of it.

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Five Cool New 'Ninja Assassin' Clips

I saw a commercial for Ninja Assassin this weekend with the tagline, "Only one ninja was harmed during the making of this movie. The rest...were killed!"

OK, so that kind of gives away the ending - and thanks a lot - but it got me thinking if there were any new clips for the film online since we shared a bad-ass ninja brawl in the middle of traffic a few weeks ago. Because this flick is directed by James McTeigue (V for Vendetta), the hope is that there's loads of action and that the film will actually be at least somewhat satisfying on an intellectual level on top of that, although there's nothing wrong with an incredibly basic ninja movie that is stuffed with fight scenes and little else. Well, we found a handful of scenes, most of which are, indeed, stuffed. And this gives us a chance to see more of McTeigue's handpicked ninja assassin, South Korean actor and dancer Rain. I can't be sure, but it's highly likely McTeigue first saw Rain in Speed Racer, directed by his mentors The Wachowski Brothers. Here are the clips:

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