Long time no see but my final exams have kept me away from writing here in the past weeks. Well now I’m back, hopefully in full force and just in time for the release of what is certainly going to be one of the biggest hits of the year, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.
This time, while trying to estimate the weekend for each of the top 5 movies at the box office, I will cheat a little since the releases of the week opened already, Eclipse on Wednesday and The Last Airbender on Thursday, and I have those numbers. So how is the weekend going to look then?
Well The Twilight Saga: Eclipse has had a tremendously successful opening day ($68.5 million) that ranks as the second highest ever (The Twilight Saga: New Moon opened to $72.7 million just 7 months ago) and is also the widest release in history with 4416 theaters ready to show the latest chapter in the vampire romance saga. Eclipse made another $24.2 million on Thursday for a total of $92.7 million so far in just 2 days. Now I expect around $75 million this weekend for the Stephenie Meyer novel turned movie, that should lead to around $168 million in 5 days, add to that equally high international numbers and Summit Entertainment got another phenomenal hit on their hands for a price tag of just $68 million, money well spent with this kind of return on investment if you ask me.
In the other corner going for a completely different demographic is The Last Airbender (previously Avatar: The Last Airbender) based on the very popular animated series with the same name. M. Night Shyamalan is back in the writer/director chair with his most expensive project yet and at the same time easily the most hated by critics standing at just 9% (94 rotten and only 9 fresh, but I still want to see it, simply out of curiosity, probably on DVD). Now what critics think of a movie doesn’t always mean much to the people that have to actually pay to see said movie, so The Last Airbender still managed a decent if not impressive (considering the bad press) $16.3 million in 3169 theaters. I’m guessing, similarly to Eclipse, this is going to be a frontloaded movie so it should slightly drop on Friday and maybe go up a little on Saturday and down (a lot) on Sunday since it is the 4th of July in the US. So $35 million for a 4-day opening of $51 million. Maybe not exactly what Paramount expected when they payed for this, but still a lot better then it could have gone (looke at Fox and Dragon Ball: Evolution).
The rest of the holdovers should do well since it is a holiday weekend and because the 4th of July is Sunday, Monday will be inflated so expect overall big number all around. Toy Story 3 might even pull a fast one on The Last Airbender and grab that 2nd place, actually I am counting on that.
- The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (Sum) $75M ($168M)
- Toy Story 3 (BV) $37M ($295.8M)
- The Last Airbender (Par) $35M ($51.3M)
- Grown Ups (Sony) $20M ($78.5M)
- Night & Day (Fox) $10M ($45.3M)
