Twilight Takes a $70 Million Dollar Bite Out of the Box Office

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on November 23, 2008

As expected, the story of the weekend was the crazed-teenage-girl reaction to Twilight, which defied predictions and rolled over the competition to the tune of $70.6 million dollars. It also inflicted significant damage to the competition. Not only did the teenage vampire movie take a bite out of the box office, it also sucked the blood out of James Bond and Bolt.

Twilight took a massive $36 million on Friday from packed midnight screenings and so on, making $7 million from midnight showings alone. Even though it dropped off a bit on the weekend ($21 mil on Saturday and $13 mil on Sunday), it still wound up winning the box office race by an easy $43 million. Importantly, it made its money this weekend without help from key male demographics. The reports are that this flick played to audiences that were 75 percent women, with over half of them under the age of 25. This movie is basically a chick flick masquerading as a vampire movie, aimed at exactly the type of people who only a few short years ago would have otherwise been glued to the television set watching the WB.

Twilight is also responsible for coining a new term for female moviegoers: “Fangirls”. Face it, these girls were as crazy as the Star Wars fans this week, with the lineups and midnight screenings and so on. Seems like 2008 is going down as the year for female movie fans to flex their muscles at the box office (occasionally, at least).

As far as records go, the opening day told most of the tale. Twilight finished as the number two best November movie opening day of all time behind Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire which led to the fourth best November opening weekend of all time; it was also the 11th best Friday opening of all time and the 15th best opening day.

As I have said, Twilight inflicted a lot of damage on the other movies that were out this weekend. James Bond had a very short week at Number One, as it turned out: Quantum of Solace dipped all the way down to $27.4 million after raking in $67.5 million last week. Its Friday showing was particularly grim: just $8.5 million that night. Still, this movie has continued to rake in the cash worldwide and is now up to a global haul of $418 million.

The big loser of the weekend was Bolt, and I’m surprised because Miley Cyrus was in the cast of voices, and you would think people would flock to see any movie Miley Cyrus is associated with. Perhaps she’s already yesterday’s news. Bolt took in a dismal $7 million haul on Friday and while it did better the rest of the weekend it still finished with only $27 million. That’s right, Bolt finished third. You would have thought that the 3-D appeal of this movie would have drawn in more people, but it didn’t.

Obviously much of Bolt’s audience went to see Twilight instead, but I have a feeling that maybe, just maybe, these young audiences were just tired of Disney movies and tired of cute family movies in general. We’ve had Beverly Hills Chihuahua and High School Musical 3, and during the summer we had Kung Fu Panda and WALL-E. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa is still in theaters, too, and it has made an absolute fortune. Something had to give.

You know, I’ve been ridiculing these cute family movies all fall, but I kind of feel sorry for this goofy mutt Bolt. The flick got 84 percent at Rotten Tomatoes (compared to 44 percent for Twilight), which goes to show that sometimes nobody cares what critics have to say. They’ll just follow the herd to where the action is, and the herds flocked to Twilight. I know people always rip the CGI flicks that Disney does on their own without PIXAR involvement, but it looks as if this time they actually put in a decent effort. Maybe Bolt will do better in coming weeks — it deserved a better fate.

The damages:

So there you have it. Be ready for a special early Thanksgiving edition of the Reject Report, as we preview three new movies that will roll out on Wednesday. Until then, don’t bite off more than you can chew at the theaters.

Read more articles by John Cairns