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I mean, who doesn't want to become an undead creature forced to live forever and dine of the blood of humans?

Kim Hollis: The Twilight Saga: Eclipse earned $64.8 million in the Friday-to-Sunday portion of the weekend, and has a running total so far of $176.4 million. How should Summit Entertainment feel about this result?

Josh Spiegel: Obviously, they should be dancing on the walls. If it wasn't for the Twilight series, they'd have a Best Picture winner to brag about (The Hurt Locker), but even that movie holds the honor of being incredibly low-grossing. Summit doesn't care a whit (or shouldn't) that Eclipse is going to perform as poorly in the future as New Moon did, because it'll make over $200 million off of a budget that's under $100 million by more than a fair bit. From a more analytical standpoint, I'm kind of surprised that, even with the frontloaded nature of the franchise, Eclipse made, in the Friday-to-Sunday period, an estimated half-million more than it did on its opening day. This series does a great job of opening huge and flaming out quickly, but all Summit should care about is the first part.

Daron Aldridge: I agree with Josh. Anything less than exuberance on Summit's part is just the greed talking. Yeah, we could nitpick that it took Eclipse five days (plus $30 million in midnights) to barely beat The Dark Knight's three-day debut and it looks to have barely topped the six-year-old mark for the same frame set by Spider-Man 2. That doesn't take away that Eclipse is -this close- to earning nine-digits over its budget in less than a week. Summit has two perfect bellwethers for how this thing will perform and they had to have been looking to open ginormously (in this case, earn your budget back in 24 hours) and then, enjoy the rest of the show.





Eric Hughes: Summit should be ecstatic, but it's probably not. New Moon came within $20 million of owning the best three-day opening weekend of all time, and Eclipse fell far short of it and the current champ, The Dark Knight. As for the five-day record, Eclipse missed that, too. I'm sure Summit expected Eclipse to bust records, and that just didn't happen (other than some opening day shenanigans). Eclipse made a tremendous amount of cash in five days, but the greedy suits probably can't help but think that Eclipse should have performed better.

Matthew Huntley: Summit should be incredibly pleased with this result, not least because the movie has already grossed about $110 million more than it cost to produce, so it's already a certified hit. If Summit is at all bummed about Eclipse not making as much money as New Moon, they can at least take solace in the fact that other franchises experienced the same result when their sequels were released within six to eight months of each other. Other examples include The Matrix Revolutions, which grossed about as half as much as Reloaded did earlier that year, and Back to the Future Part III, which made about 50% less than Part II, which came out six months prior. It may just be a case of Twilight overload. Studios should take a hint and at least wait a full year so fans have enough time to get excited for the next installment (like Lord of the Rings).

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