Summit Entertainment is pretty happy with themselves this weekend with their Twilight sequel New Moon already breaking loads of sales records in just the first day. It surely seems now that rushing the film into production after last November’s success of the first book in Stephanie Meyer’s vampire novel series was a good idea. Continuing the momemtum and hype, the third installment Eclipse has already wrapped filming and is set for a summer release, only half a year away.
Check out after the jump for a list of ridiculously high financial stats for New Moon coming in from reports everywhere.
With the expected (and now realized) opening success of New Moon, I am surprised that in my screening of the movie, there were no trailers for other major upcoming films – What we saw instead was all just for upcoming movies from Summit and E1 Entertainment and no other studios took advantage of the masses of eager moviegoers sitting in packed theaters everywhere.
Here are the numbers reported from Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood as of this morning:
- Debuted at around $72 million in 4024 theaters but results still coming in.
- Breaks the record for Friday opening and single day sales ($67 million from The Dark Knight).
- The Friday totals include the insanely high midnight screenings that brought in 26.27 million from 3514 theaters – this beats both The Dark Knight and the latest Harry Potter.
- Tracking for a $125 opening weekend which is still under numbers for the third Pirates of the Caribbean, The Dark Knight or Spider-Man 3.
- Last year’s Twilight brought in just under $70 million so this one is destroying it as well as expectations which had the movie likely getting close to Iron Man numbers around $100 million.
Fandango is reporting that New Moon is selling 10 tickets/second throughout Friday and it’s the number one advanced ticket seller of all time for them.
What do you think of the box-office success of the Twilight films so far and what do you expect from next year’s installment?
If you missed it, check out Screen Rant’s New Moon Review.
Directed by Chris Weitz, New Moon stars Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Robert Pattinson and Ashley Greene – it’s playing everywhere currently. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse opens June 30, 2010 and is directed by David Slade.
