So, it was a fairly safe assumption that the film was going to do well at the box office. Very well. Heck, I safely predicted last week that this week New Moon would take the No.1 spot pretty much everywhere. But even Alice and her vampire clairvoyance would be shocked by the sheer size of their dominance. The Twilight Saga: New Moon has sucked in the highest-grossing opening weekend in Australia ever, with a box office of $16,010,000.
That has smashed records set by Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and the third instalment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Two Towers, which opened at $14,331,000 and $14,139,000 respectively.
On top of that, the astonishing weekend was kicked off with another record. New Moon took the third highest opening day ever, with a box office of $5,043,938, beaten only by the Lord of the Rings' The Return of the King and Two Towers, which both opened on Boxing Day, making this the largest non-holiday opening day box office ever.
No. Not even the film's distributors were expecting that, with Robert Slaviero, chief executive of Hoyts Distribution describing it as "a phenomenal result, this is way beyond our expectations and confirms that the Twilight franchise has well and truly arrived".
Overseas it was pretty much same story, different currency. In North America, there are only so many ways to explain how large the result was. New Moon took in more than four times its closest competitor (fellow new release The Blind Side). It also took in more than the other nine films in the top 10 combined. In one weekend it took more than Couples Retreat has managed in seven weeks.
And in taking more than $US140 million, it easily became the highest opener of 2009 and the third highest-grossing opening of all time in North America, behind only The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3 .
Worldwide, opening in 25 territories, New Moon took in a little over a quarter of a billion US dollars. Its haul of $258.8 million ranked it the seventh highest-grossing global opening of all time.
So, congratulations Twi-hards; you've taken over the world!
That said, it was a good weekend for some other too. Oprah Winfrey project Precious continued to grow week on week, despite dropping a few places in the rankings. 2012 took third place with a second weekend figure that would have made it win some slower weekends this year.
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