Anyone who predicted “Twilight” and “Bolt” would be having a showdown this weekend (erm, like The Playlist) sure do have egg on their face right now. Teen girl phenomenon “Twilight” created a huge box office story, raking in $35M on it’s first day and garnering a weekend total of $70.55M which lead it to be one of the biggest opening weekend stories of 2008 and the biggest opening for a female director (Catherine Hardwicke) ever. It absolutely obliterated all the competition.
Those Saturday numbers prompted Summit Entertainment to announce they were officially green lighting ‘Twilight’ sequel “New Moon,” making the ‘Twilight’ series the first in a potential new fangirl genre. 2008’s two previous female box office win stories, “Sex and the City” and “Mamma Mia!” were both older skewing and featured much less shrieking in theaters. Fangirls also propelled the ‘High School Musical’ franchise to the box office this year – after all Disney’s success with the first two films on TV they took the third one to theaters for a gross of $86M so far.
The difference between ‘High School Musical’ and ‘Twilight’ however is that Twilighters (what the fangirls for this franchise call themselves) brought their moms and older sisters to the theater with them. A full 75% of ‘Twilight’s’ audience this weekend was revealed to be female by exit polling and 55% of ticket buyers were under 25 years old.
Hindsight being 20/20 it seems easy to predict this film would do gang busters – not only does it have a serialized, beloved book franchise behind it but the Internet machine has been in hyper drive around the movie since it started filming. Summit Entertainment went to great lengths to keep book author Stephenie Meyer involved in the movie’s development and she in turn wrote many positive things about it on her website, which was heavily trafficked by fans. Additionally they made details of the movie and interviews with cast and crew available to hardcore fan sites from the get-go. They also saw heavy and early reporting on the movie from youth culture sites like MTV.com in addition to the millions of blogs dedicated to the series.
Fandango.com (via Time) reported that in a survey of “Twilight” early ticket buyers more than 85% said they intended to see the movie more than once – which is certainly not atypical for teen girls. The question the movie industry are asking now is will young boys follow the girls to the theater for “Twilight”? Not that it matters – this franchise will be a money maker with or without them.
In other box office news, the James Bond franchise continues its blockbuster performance with “Quantum of Solace” at #2 with $27.4M and a continued #1 international box office. Not a bad second week, but that is ceratinly a troublingly large drop in ticket sales – much larger than week two saw for “Casino Royale.”
Meanwhile, Disney/Pixar’s “Bolt,” which was also forecasted to hit the $40M range and be a serious “Twilight” foil ended up at the weekend box office #3 slot with $27M. Industry wonks like to say ‘Twilight’s’ fangirl audience cut into ‘Bolt’s’ profits but we say perhaps you were all greatly overestimating general interest in hearing a voice over performance by Miley Cyrus.
The rest of the box office rounds out basically as expected. “Role Models” hangs in at #5 making $7.2M more and looking to be a long tail hit. Huge number dive below that with “Changeling” at #6 with $2.6M and it only gets worse from there.
1. “Twilight,” $70.55M
2. “Quantum of Solace,” $27.4M
3. “Bolt,” $27M
4. “Madagascar Escape 2 Africa,” $16M
5. “Role Models,” $7.2M
6. “Changeling,” $2.6M
7. “High School Musical 3: Senior Year,” $2M
8. “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” $1.7M
9. “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” $1.67M
10. “The Secret Life of Bees,” $1.27M