Boxoffice.com reports that the official Friday estimate for Breaking Dawn — Part 2 is $71.2 million [with] Summit estimating “in the range of $135 million” for the weekend. That’s almost exactly the same amount earned by The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part I, which took in $138.1 million domestic.
“A lot of people have dropped off the Twilight bandwagon,” Phil Contrino maintains. “The last installment of a major franchise should be the biggest, but that didn’t happen here….it’s htting the base only, and even some of the base has grown up and moved on.,..$71.2 million for the domestic weekend,…worldwide will be the thing.”
Contrino also informed this morning that Silver Linings Playbook is off to something of a slow start — $120,416 in 16 theatres for an average of $7526 on Friday. That’s to be expected with two other popular, well-established adult flicks, Skyfall and Lincoln, competing for ticket dollars, not to mention all the low-information viewers flocking to Breaking Dawn.
The long line of cars clogging the Arclight garage last night was ridiculous. I took one look and said “fuck that” and drove off. Effing Twihards and their boyfriends.
People are traditionally very, very slow to pick up on special-quality-type films before or concurrent with a limited opening. People need big familiar concepts (i.e., franchises, right-down-the-middle genre films, comic-book origins), big names and familiar big-movie elements. I wrote in early September that “serious romcom fans allegedly like stupid and sappy, so maybe the girly-girls who like Kate Hudson movies will hold back just a bit because Silver Linings Playbook is too smart and probing and raggedy-jaggedy, but I’ll be astonished if it doesn’t make at least $100 million.”
An SLP guy expects that the film “will do better than estimated as the word-of-mouth will be super strong. The reviews are gangbusters. The audience will find this movie, even if we have to annoy them all the way to the Academy Awards — we will get them. It’s just too great of a picture to ever ever give up on.”
