New Moon opened with a whopping $142.8M, enough for the third largest opening weekend in history behind 2008’s The Dark Knight ($158.4M) and 2007’s Spider-Man 3 ($151.1M). The film shattered industry expectations (and mine) proving once again what a formidable force teenage girls can be at the box office. I don’t know why we need to relearn this lesson as teenage girls in love with Leonardo DiCaprio are the reason that Titanic sailed its way to the highest grossing film of all time. 

I knew that Twilight was going to have a big debut and that it was going to be the biggest weekend of the year, but did I expect $140M+ weekend? Not at all. My $110M prediction felt slightly low after I posted it, but at max I expected the film to rake in $120M. I also didn’t expect it to break any records, but New Moon has in fact broken two of the most prominent. Getting started with Thursday midnight showings, New Moon collected a heaping $26.3M beating the all time midnight gross record set by Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince this past July. The film went on to bleed $72.7M (including Thursday midnight) out of ticket buyers in its first day of release, destroying The Dark Knight’s record of $67.2M. To be honest, I thought Batman would hold on to this record for much longer than he did. 

Critics weren’t very kind to New Moon (read my review here) but this series is virtually bulletproof. It’ll be interesting to see how the film performs over the next few weekends, although I don’t expect the film to be breaking any more records. Normally a blockbuster of this proportion would be in for a hard fall in its second weekend, probably in the neighborhood of 65%, but with this being a holiday weekend, Twilight may drop only 50%. I’ll come up with a firmer prediction later in the week. 

Just months after experiencing her best opening weekend ever with The Proposal ($33.6M); Sandra Bullock broke her record once again with The Blind Side. The film tackled its way to $34.1M and helped make this weekend the second biggest weekend of all time at the box office behind The Dark Knight’s debut frame back in July of 2008. This was way higher than my $13M prediction, which is now the worst prediction of my career so far. I can’t tell you how surprised I am by this films performance. The only explanation that I have for why The Blind Side performed so well is that those moviegoers shut out of Twilight due to sold out shows chose to see the Sandra Bullock vehicle instead. It’s the only thing that makes any sense to me. 

The final new film of the frame, animated astronaut flick, Planet 51, opened with a mild $12.3M in fourth place. This was very close to my $11.5M prediction and I can take some solace in the fact that I was right about 1 out of 3 new releases this weekend. Planet 51’s performance once again proves that any animated film not being released in 3-D is at a disadvantage. The reviews have been pretty bad and the film has an extremely tough weekend in front of it where it will face major competition from Disney’s Old Dogs and the expansion of Fantastic Mr. Fox. 

Among holdovers, disaster flick 2012 performed much like fellow end of the world film, The Day After Tomorrow, falling 59% to collect another $26.4M, right in line with my forecast for a 60% drop. The film’s total stands at $108.2M after 10 days of release. 2012 should wind up in the $160M vicinity by the end of its run. 

To see how the rest of the top 10 shaped up and how my other predictions for the weekend fared, check out the chart below.

Be sure to come back Thursday for my predictions for this weekend’s releases, Old Dogs, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Ninja Assassin and The Road.

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