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Shalimar Sahota: I've not seen any of the Twilight films, so I'm probably not qualified to offer any thoughts on this, except to say, "Hey, that's huge! Well done Summit Entertainment." As an outsider looking in, the film is (still?) dealing with an awkward love triangle, there's a wedding, bed-breaking sex, having a baby... supposedly all the things young girls think about. For them, it's just like real life, except there's the addition of vampires and werewolves, which gives it that extra zing. Hell, if the Sex and the City movies had vampires and werewolves, they would have made over $100 million on opening weekend for sure.

Reagen Sulewski: At this point, I'm treating the Twilight franchise like a high-grade fever - it's just got to burn itself out and then we'll be done with it for good. Luckily we've only got one more edition of this should-be-a-bad-CW series to go. This is going to be one of those things where people 15 years from now are going to look back and think "were you just all on drugs, or something"?

David Mumpower: I love how cantankerous and male we sound when we talk about Twilight. Even most of the women on the site hate it. Out of our revolving door of 25+ contributors, I can only think of two offhand who enjoy the series. That alone tells me that we have the same ability to talk about Twilight as we do about Egyptian hieroglyphics, maybe even less. I don't know all of your Rosetta Stone-inclusive hobbies. What I think when I see this opening weekend performance is "expected". When the announcement was made that Breaking Dawn would be split into two films a la Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I instantly recognized this as a cash grab. While the story developments in the final Harry Potter installment require more than two and a half hours of screen time, even at 756 pages, Breaking Dawn is easily reduced to a few key moments. the decision to split it was predicated upon the fact that Harry Potter earned an extra billion dollars worldwide by having a second movie. Why shouldn't Twilight try to pull off the same accounting feat? Shaving with Occam's Razor, more films means more money. This opening weekend result of $138.1 million domestically, $283.5 million worldwide is only half a paycheck. The other half arrives in a year. This is clever business even if it does mean stretching out the worst pop culture phenomenon of our lifetime for another 12 months.

Edwin Davies: Everyone else has said pretty much everything that I thought about this; it's a very impressive figure, and at the very least it means that we can finally talk about a film that is a breakout success for the first time in ages, and it's clear from this that the audience for these films have not grown beyond the second film, considering their eerily similar totals. (A trend that I fully expect to see continue to the final grosses, since this one will probably end up with around $300 million as both New Moon and Eclipse did.) I do think that the final entry in the series has a chance at beating Harry Potter, though, if only because the audience will have reached such a fever pitch by then that the faithful will be out in even more force than they have been the last few times out. However, by that point it won't be trying to beat Harry Potter's opening weekend record, but The Dark Knight Rises' record, which it may struggle to do.

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