New Moon breaks the midnight screening record. Robert Pattinson and Kristin Stewart can't believe it either!
Photo: Summit Entertainment
Summit Entertainment has just announced that The Twilight Saga: New Moon has set a new record for earnings reported from midnight screenings across the country, earning a whopping $26.7M from 3,514 theaters! Yes, that number is only from midnight shows. The gross easily beats the previous records held by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ($22.5M) on July 15, 2009 and The Dark Knight ($18.4M) on July 18, 2008.
Additionally, according to Deadline Hollywood Daily, Fandango.com is reporting that New Moon is selling 10 tickets per second online throughout the course of today, Friday, November 20, 2009 so this day could be one for the record books.
The Twilight Saga: New Moon poster
With the all-time midnight record now broken, New Moon will set its sight on the All-time opening day record currently held by The Dark Knight ($67.2M) on July 18, 2008 as well as the largest opening weekend record, also held by The Dark Knight ($158.4M) on July 18-20, 2008.
At its current pace, the opening day record will certainly be attainable, although it is unlikely that the opening weekend record will be topped. I say this because, unlike films like The Dark Knight and Harry Potter, Twilight is a series that doesn’t have much appeal to those outside its core fan-base. Most hardcore fans will see the film on opening day instead of waiting for Saturday or Sunday.
Another reason why New Moon is unlikely to break The Dark Knight’s opening weekend is its mostly two-quadrant appeal (young women and older women). Most men, who make up the largest movie-going demographic in the United States, are simply not interested in the film.
A film like The Dark Knight, on the other hand, appealed to all four demographics (young and older men and women) with many older people and non-fans curious to see the late Heath Ledger’s much talked about performance as The Joker. This wild-card factor is what propelled the film, along with glowing reviews, to unexpected heights.
New Moon is expected to perform a lot like its prequel Twilight, which made 51% of its $69.6M opening weekend gross on Friday and then proceeded to have a massive 50% drop on Saturday unlike The Dark Knight which dropped a mere 29% ($47.6M) on Saturday and only 8.5% ($43.5M) on Sunday.
While New Moon is expected to become one of the top earning films of the year, it is unlikely to score the heights of films like Titanic, The Dark Knight or Star Wars, because word-of-mouth and reviews outside the hardcore fanbase is venomous (critics trashed the film), meaning it will not have very strong legs during the busy holiday season. Then again, if trash like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen can gross $402 million then so can New Moon, so we can never tell.
I will continue to cover the box office performance of New Moon throughout the weekend so keep a lookout for those updates. Subscribe above to be the first to receive updates on New Moon’s record-breaking box office performance.
SOURCE: Deadline Hollywood Daily, Box Office Mojo.
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