Twilight Bites Into the Weekend Box Office

Published by Jeff Leins on: November 23rd, 2008

Twilight easily won the weekend box office with record sales and a $70.6 million debut for the low-budget vampire movie.

The frenzy for tickets started several weeks ago, but it hit a high point in the waning days as sold out shows started popping up all over the country. On Friday morning, an average of 5 tickets were selling every second on Fandango.com. The midnight screenings alone made the movie $7 million, an impressive start for a movie that played to a mostly female audience (exit polling shows it skewed 75% female and 25% male).

According to USA Today, the opening is the largest ever for a female director (Catherine Hardwicke), crushing the previous record set by Deep Impact’s Mimi Leder in 1998. It’s also the largest opening ever for the vampire genre, easily out pacing 2004’s Van Helsing by almost $20 million.

The movie was criticproof. It only earned about 44% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but no amount of bad news would keep fans from checking out the first adaptation of their favorite novel series. There seems to be some sort of battle raging on the IMDB scoring page also, where the movie has a 5.3 rating. Out of the 2,739 votes so far, 59% are a perfect score of 10 and about 27% are the lowest score of 1.

Twilight was budgeted at around $37 million, but grossed double that to become the 4th largest opening of 2008. The teen vampire drama also has the 4th largest November opening of all-time behind 3 Harry Potter movies. The $35.9 million opening day is 14th on the all-time openers list. It overshadowed just about all of Quantum of Solace’s records set just last week.

But the new Bond wasn’t sweating it as he added another $27.4 million to its domestic total and remained in second place. It crossed the $100 million mark on Saturday, the fastest in franchise history in just 9 days. Worldwide, it has already made $418 million.

The other new movie this weekend, Disney’s animated Bolt, felt the effects of the Twilight run though, debuting $10 million less than expected with $27 million. It played in about 200 more theaters than the PG-13 vampire movie. However, it had the biggest digital 3D opening on approximately 979 screens that did twice the business of regular theaters.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a movie about childhood in a Nazi concentration camp, jumped into the top 10 with an estimated $1.7 million in just 406 theaters. Oscar hopeful indie Slumdog Millionaire just missed top 10 status with an 11th place $994,000 in only 32 theaters.  It has an amazing per theater average of $31,000 and is already out pacing last year’s indie favorite Juno.

1. Twilight $70.6 million
2. Quantum of Solace $27.4 million
3. Bolt $27 million
4. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa $16 million
5. Role Models $7.2 million
6. Changeling $2.6 million
7. High School Musical 3 $2 million
8. Zack and Miri Make a Porno $1.7 million
9. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas $1.7 million
10. The Secret Life of Bees $1.3 million