The box office is lifeless no more: “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1” opened to $139.5 million domestically this weekend, according to studio data.
The fourth of Summit’s vampire-and-werewolf movies had the franchise’s second best three-day opening ever, behind 2009’s “New Moon” ($142.8 million in November 2009).
For a box office that’s down about 3.5 percent from last year,”The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn” is only the second movie this year, including the summer’s final “Harry Potter” film, to open to more than $100 million. (There were four $100 million openers last year.)
And it had the third-best opening Friday ever, grossing $71.4 million — behind only this year’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” and “New Moon.”
“Breaking Dawn’s” international numbers were as strong as its domestic ones. The movie grossed $144 million in 54 territories, giving it a worldwide box office total of $283.5 million in just three days. The movie cost about $110 million to make, after tax rebates.
While “Breaking Dawn” almost exactly matched its pre-release predictions, the animated penguins of Warner Bros. “Happy Feet Two” grossed only $22 million, according to studio estimates — enough to rank the movie No. 2 this weekend, but still a disappointing performance. The movie was projected to open to about $30 million.
Relativity Media’s “Immortals,” meanwhile, grossed $12.2 million in its second weekend of release — a 62 percent drop. It is No. 3 at the box office.
The best per-screen numbers of the weekend belonged to Fox Searchlight’s “The Descendants.” The movie, which stars George Clooney, opened in 29 locations, but was still No. 10 at the box office with $1.3 million. That’s a spectacular per-screen average of $44,800.
“Breaking Dawn,” by comparison, opened at 4,061 locations and averaged $34,245. Summit’s president of domestic distribution, Richie Fay, told TheWrap Sunday that the fourth installment of any franchise can be a little worrisome. “There’s a definite interest in wanting to continue to see the series,” he said. “The fact that our audience is aging up a little bit, the impulse to get out and see it on the first weekend isn’t necessarily there the way it has been. To me, that means that the holdover should be much better.”
“Breaking Dawn’s audience was 80 percent female and 60 percent older than 21. According to moviegoer survey firm CinemaScore, the movie graded out at a so-so “B-plus” among all age and gender groups.
On the strength of “Breaking Dawn,” the box office was up 14 percent this weekend compared to the same weekend last year.
“In a period where it’s been … a down cycle of growth, we’ve got the public interested in a movie again — and in going to movies as we approach Thanksgiving and obviously Christmas,” Fay said.
He said the movie’s strongest performance was in Salt Lake City, followed by New York City.
The weekend’s other major release — also a sequel — had a tougher time at the box office. “Happy Feet Two,” the follow-up to the 2006 Oscar-winning hit, underperformed.
“We obviously came in a little bit under our expectations on ‘Happy Feet,’ but the marketplace is very competitive out there, especially with ‘Twilight’ getting close to 80 percent of the female audience,” Dan Fellman, Warner Bros. president of distribution, told TheWrap Sunday.
The PG-rated animated movie about dancing penguins received a B-plus CinemaScore. And it has some tough competition coming up, with “Hugo,” “The Muppets” and “Arthur Christmas” all opening up for Thanksgiving week.
“The market expands enormously over the holiday,” Fellman said. “By next Monday, we’ll know whether we’re in good shape.”
The first “Happy Feet” opened to $41.5 million and ultimately grossed $198 million domestically and $384.3 million worldwide. Its budget was estimated at $100 million. The second cost an estimated $140 million to make.
“After ‘Twilight’ gets in a couple of hundred million dollars worth of business in the first week, you’ll see some of the female audience move over to ‘Happy Feet,'” Fellman predicted.
Internationally, Steven Spielberg’s motion-capture extravaganza “The Adventures of Tintin” continued to perform well, grossing $21.7 million on 13,040 screens in 53 markets.
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