Tagged: The Blind Side

Blind Side blindsides New Moon

In its third week of release, the Sandra Bullock football drama, The Blind Side, has maintained its audience better than has The Twilight Saga: New Moon, surging ahead to take the top spot in the box office this weekend after holding second place to the vampire drama and their dark eye circles crowd for the past two weeks.

The Blind Side garnered $20.4 million in ticket sales this weekend, bringing its total to date to $129.2 million domestically and since the movie hasn’t made it overseas yet, that’s all it’s made. Still, that’s a hefty $100 million more than the modest $29 million comedy cost to make.

By comparison, New Moon raked in an additional $15.7 million to hold on to second place, bringing its domestic total to $255 million, with foreign markets adding another $243 million for a worldwide take of $498 million. The third movie in the series, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, just finished shooting and is on track for release this coming summer.

Currently, Summit Entertainment is weighing its options on the fourth and final book in the Twilight Saga. They could either make one movie and keep all their actors under the terms of their current contracts, or split the hefty 700+ page novel into two features, which would mean principals Robert Pattinson, Kristin Stewart and company would all get a chance to renegotiate their contracts for bigger paydays.

There’s also the complexly graphic plot of the fourth book, which involves (among other things) intricacies about vampire-human sex, a pregnancy and the birth of a half-vamp/half-human baby. It’s risque material that could push the movie beyond its current PG-13 rating, a risk against the box office draws the more innocently-themed movies released to date have enjoyed.

Odds are, Summit will go the riskier, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows route and split the lengthy Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn into a two-part feature.

Meanwhile, no other movie could even manage to break the $10 million mark this week; that includes the character drama Brothers, Armored, and Everybody’s Fine, which finished in third, sixth and tenth places respectively.

Don’t expect things to change much next weekend, either; with the Morgan Freeman-Matt Damon South African politics movie Invictus being the best chance to break through, there’s not much hope for the first and second spots to be dethroned any time prior to the release of Jame Cameron’s AVATAR in two weeks. After that, December will get competitive again with films like Did You Hear About the Morgans, It’s Complicated, Alvin and the Chipmunk: The Squeakel, and Robert Downey Jr’s take on Sherlock Holmes all promising to be potential breakthrough hits behind a wave mounted by AVATAR.

New Moon shatters records!

Stephanie Meyer’s cell phones are probably full of voicemails containing well-wishes tonight; the movie based on book two of her young adult vampire romance, New Moon, part of her four-book Twilight Saga series, shattered box office records this past weekend. The film’s domestic take was $140.7 million, but add to that total an additional $118.1 million from foreign markets and you get an opening three-day total of a whopping $258.8 million in early box office estimates.

The opening shatters all November opening weekend records, and ranks the film as the third-strongest opening weekend of all time, right behind The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3. Considering that the original Twilight grossed a mere $180 million or so domestically in a 13-week run last year at this time, this strong opening almost guarantees New Moon will outpace Twilight by a dramatic degree.

Book 3 of the Twilight Saga, Eclipse, is scheduled to hit theatres already on June 30, 2010, a mere seven months from now; the impending Thanksgiving 2010 release of part one of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows scared Summit Entertainment away from maintaining its traditional Thanksgiving release schedule, but since no other major movie is currently scheduled for June 30, 2010, the scheduling of Eclipse for that weekend, along with the strong performance of New Moon, virtually guarantees that no serious challengers will emerge on the same weekend, as well as allowing plenty of spacing between the Twilight Saga and Harry Potter franchise releases, which tend to draw on the same core audience.

Sandra Bullock’s football dramedy, The Blind Side, also opened strong, though admittedly well behind New Moon; the flick drew $34.5 million in its opening bow to secure second place, well ahead of last week’s box office champion, 2012, which dropped to a distant third, drawing $26.5 million in its second week of release, a dramatic falloff of 60 percent from its first weekend. 2012 seems to be aching from poor word-of-mouth syndrome, with the typical line being, “Great special effects, stupid story.” Add in some “oh what b.s.” moments in the action sequences and you have a classic scenario for a fall from grace.

2012′s domestic total is a mere $108 million at this point, but has done dramatically better in foreign markets, where it has already grossed $341 million to date. That should help producers with the $200 million budget, but clearly the film will not do anywhere near as well domestically as Roland Emmerich’s other major releases, such as Independence Day and, more notably, a similarly-theme Day After Tomorrow.

In all, six movies this weekend grossed at least $10 million, and the top 12 grossing films combined for an impressive weekend box office total of $248.6 million, nearly twice that of last weekend’s take, and we’re still not to Thanksgiving weekend yet, traditionally the largest-grossing weekend of November.

Yet with the only remaining major releases being the videogame-inspired action flick, Ninja Assassin, and the John Travolta-Robin Williams buddy comedy Old Dogs, it’s unlikely the top three spots in the box office total will be threatened by any of the newcomers.

The next film with major expectations attached to it won’t hit theatres until December 18, when James Cameron’s Avatar is due to hit theatres.