Weekend Box Office: The sparkling vampire
With resounding force, The Twilight Saga: New Moon affirmed this weekend what Titanic, Backstreet Boys, and Shaun Cassidy did before it: Pre-teen girls are an unstoppable market force. Despite generally poor reviews—which would dissuade approximately 0% of the series’ fans anyway—New Moon enjoyed the third highest opening weekend ever with $140.7 million, second only to The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3. That accomplishment is all the more impressive when you consider that it more than doubled its predecessor Twilight’s opening frame from a year before and it only cost $50 million to produce. (More fun facts: 80% of viewers were women, and another 50% under 20 years old.) It’ll likely drop like a stone in week two, but given the current take-the-money-and-run mentality of blockbuster filmmaking, even a total collapse wouldn’t matter much at this point.