| "New Moon" sets record at the box office, grosses $142.8 million |
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24/11/2009 15:16 (77 Day 07:34 minutes ago) | |||||
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The FINANCIAL -- "New Moon," the latest film in "The Twilight Saga" is doing record business at the box office, CNN reports. In its opening weekend the film grossed $140.7 million -- more than any other film with an autumn release in history.
Final box office figures for "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" showed the movie's ticket sales rising to $142.8 million from an estimated $140.7 million last weekend, the studio behind the film said on Monday, according to Reuters.
"New Moon" opened on Friday as a sequel to last year's "Twilight." It enjoyed the biggest opening weekend of 2009 and placed third for the top opening weekend ever behind last year's Batman movie "The Dark Knight" ($158 million) and 2007's "Spider-Man 3" ($151 million), the same source reports.
Its new opening weekend overseas total, $132.1 million, is $14 million, or 12%, higher than its estimate Sunday morning of $118.1 million. Combined with the newly updated domestic total of $142.8 million, which is $2.1 million higher than Summit's Sunday morning estimate, it turns out that "New Moon" opened to $274.9 million, the sixth-highest worldwide debut of all time, Los Angels Times wrote. Foreign countries where the movie opened big include Australia, Brazil, Britain, France, Italy, Mexico, Russia and Spain.
It's not unusual for movies to end up with different weekend grosses than the ones reported by studios Sunday mornings. It is rare, however, for Sunday estimates to be as low as Summit's was for "New Moon, "according to the same source. That's partly because nobody was able to estimate just how huge the "Twilight" sequel would be. Before the weekend, experienced executives looking at pre-release polling data expected it to gross between $90 million and $100 million domestically. Even on Friday night, after the movie's record-breaking Friday ticket sales, competing studios were projecting that "New Moon" would collect about $125 million domestically through Sunday.
Elizabeth Morowitz, Communications Professor at the University of Missouri and author of "Bitten By Twilight" thinks that this more sensitive approach is the key to the film's success, CNN informs. "A lot of people ask 'what's so appealing about the Twilight and why is it popular now?' and we think it's because of the relationships and the messages about love in Twilight. In a more conservative environment we've had this push for abstinence education, so we now have a media message that's more congruent with that. So perhaps some teens relate to it in that way," Morowitz told CNN's Katie Walmsley.
The director of "New Moon" Chris Weitz says that sexual abstinence is central to the film's appeal, according to the same source. "It's not that they can't have sex, they choose not to and I think there's so much popular culture that's saying to young people: 'you'll be cool if you have sex' or 'it's important to be sexy' whereas this series really concentrates on matters of the heart and spirit and I think that's lovely," Weitz told CNN.
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