Weekend Box Office: Victory For Garbage! ‘New Moon’ Scores Third Biggest Opening Of All Time

Hooray for everyone! Hollywood must love this weekend, because by the numbers, it looks like everyone wins. Thanks to “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” for getting the major front page headlines on the nation’s lesser newspapers, spotlighting just how much moviegoing is thriving in the face of terrorism, piracy and, what is it this week? Yes, swine flu, forgot about that. One of the most lucrative moviegoing weekends of all time was highlighted by the third highest opening ever for a single film. $140 million worth of moviegoers were seduced by the regressive, socially-damaging and all-around shameful “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” a record for vampire-werewolf teen romances. Update: New numbers are in and “New Moon” actually made $142 million, christ.

The film was frontloaded like hell, with half of the weekend take exceeding the $69 million opening of the original on Friday only, but the total number is still high enough to place the weekend in the rarefied air of superhero films “The Spider-Man Saga: Spider-Man 3” and “The Batman Saga: The Dark Knight.”

News of this opening is probably going to trump whoever wants to discuss the coming second weekend free-fall, but it remains big news for the bean-counters, given another reminder that 1) teen girls are still as much of a nondiscriminatory cash cow (boys too) as they were when “Titanic” courted repeat viewers a decade ago, and 2) You really can just hype any stupid shit and people will flock to it like retards chasing a candy bar on a stick. Cinemascore reports an overall score of A- (a rating lifted probably by enthusiastic moviegoers who decided they liked it before entering the theater), which, coupled with the money, guarantees a full series from cash-cow milkers Summit Entertainment.

If the second film had done poorly, there would have been no guarantee of a fourth film, “Breaking Dawn,” coming after the currently-shooting “Eclipse,” but now even if the third film flops, the series is a phenomenon and they can shuck commemorative cups or stolen Robert Pattinson jock straps well into the next decade if the studio so pleases. The movies are reportedly as cheap as those other werewolf-vampire clash movies in the “Underworld” series (and just as interesting!) so right now someone is genuinely swimming in a big ole Scrooge McDuck pile of coins.

Worth noting is that the opener is more than TWICE that of “Twilight”‘s mammoth first weekend, which means that, somehow, despite word getting out that these were seriously dangerous, creatively bankrupt and socially inhuman books and movies, the base expanded. To what extent, we don’t know. If there’s a second weekend drop of 70% (which might not be a given- lots of families appreciate the chance to torture their brood on Thanksgiving and vice versa) that’s still a $42 million opening weekend, and at that point the film will have cleared $200 million. $100 million used to be a zeitgeist number. It meant that your grandmother, your postman, even the creepy co-worker in the corner cubicle had seen it. This year, we’ll have six over the $200 mark before December, with two others (“Monsters Vs. Aliens,” “Ice Age 3”) just barely missing. What does this mean about the type of movies Americans like to see in 2009? If “New Moon” has anything to say about it, the results are unkind.

Speaking of socially questionable, audiences somehow didn’t laugh the racially-iffy “The Blind Side” off the screen. Sandra Bullock’s star power cannot be underestimated, it seems, even when she’s taking in an uneducated black teenager and teaching him to get onto a football field and hit people instead of bothering with all that book-learnin’. “The Blind Side” out-urbaned “Precious” to score $34.5 million, Bullock’s biggest opener ever, cementing her as the ideal female lead, tomboyishly pretty enough for the men (and, with the copious NFL ads on Sundays, the men definitely came) and unthreateningly pretty enough for the women (the Thundercats-like plastic surgery helped, no doubt). So, you know, don’t feel bad, feminists- women AND minorities both took a step back this weekend. Expect this success to goose chances of Will Smith starring in “Blind Side” director John Lee Hancock’s Hurricane Katrina film, even though Hancock should probably be dispensing with his racial views at some isolated pump station or something.

“2012” sorta laid an egg in the face of the “Twilight” craze, dropping nearly 60% at #3, but it’s at $108 million after two weeks, while also demolishing records in foreign countries. The hold is respectable enough in the wake of “Twilight”- consider “Hellboy 2: The Golden Army” a week after “The Dark Knight,” plummeting 70% in its second weekend against the competition while holdovers like “Hancock” didn’t fare much better. “2012” is sure to level off in coming weeks as “Twilight” mania dies down (fingers crossed?). Debuting softly at #4 was “Planet 51,” the poorly marketed toon from Sony Animation, just barely beating out the IMAX-fueled “A Christmas Carol.” Sony put the Dwayne Johnson-led picture in 3000 theaters but the meager advertising push is probably due to it looking like a weak sister in the wake of their “Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs” scoring big. While “Meatballs” was a big hit, “Planet 51” is the latest in a long line of failures for the animation shingle, which just made panic moves in pushing their upcoming “The Smurfs Movie” out of a winter ’10 release and indefinitely postponing another project, “Hotel Transylvania.”

In the fewest theaters in the top ten, “Precious: Based On The Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire” continued to rack up the cash. It fell out of the top five but still posted its best weekend yet, averaging $17k per in less than 700 theaters. Lionsgate is being gunshy about the film’s breakout potential, and while they’re definitely making a pretty penny, the coming overcrowding of theaters won’t help their desire to expand onto a thousand screens. Additionally, the divisive film is being protested by a vocal minority in the blog and critic circles, and the longer LG sits on a bigger expansion, the louder those voices become (voices which were absent during the rise of the significantly more problematic “Slumdog Millionaire” last year, we might add). The studio is doing handsomely with their product, and the expansion numbers still breed confidence, but if they don’t pull a smash and grab in the next few weeks, that vocal minority could sink the film in the eyes of the rubbernecking idiot awards voters who consider factors outside of their own viewing experiences.

Outside of the top ten, internet-meme-turned-movie “Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans” debuted with a $9k per theater average, in the realm of Nicolas Cage’s bigger recent per-screen debuts, for a $257k total on only 27 screens. Enough for an expansion? We’ll see. The weekend’s biggest per-screen average belonged not to “New Moon” but instead Pedro Almodovar’s “Broken Embraces,” which tallied $54k on only two screens. In advance of it’s Thanksgiving expansion, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” pulled in $49k per screen for a $199k weekend on four screens, which is certainly promising, while there’s a little muscle being shown by Freestyle Releasing’s under-the-radar “That Evening Sun.” In its third weekend, the film added three screens (it’s on four total) and took a very-strong $25k total gross. The indie’s generated a bit of heat for another Oscar nomination for lead Hal Holbrook, so any extra attention the film can get is good for a bit of awards attention. Support your local independent cinema, folks.

1. Women Are Subservient Creatures Who Need Men To Protect Them From Everything- $140.7 million
2. The Blind Side- $34.5 million
3. 2012- $26.5 million ($108 mil.)
4. Planet 51- $12.6 million
5. A Christmas Carol- $12.2 million ($80 mil.)
6. Precious: Based On The Cookbook ‘Salads For All Occassions’ By Sapphire- $11 million ($21 mil.)
7. The Men Who Stare At Goats- $2.8 million ($28 mil.)
8. Couples Retreat- $2 million ($105 mil.)
9. The Fourth Kind- $1.7 million ($23 mil.)
10. Law Abiding Citizen- $1.6 million ($70 mil.)