It’s a new dawn at the multiplex. Breaking Dawn, that is.
The Twilight Series: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 sucked scads of cash out of the box office this weekend, with moviegoers forking over $139.5 million to see Edward and Bella get married, have sex and go through arguably the most disturbing cinematic birth scene ever. It didn’t matter that critics dismissed the film as a Breaking Yawn (it’s registering just a 28% “freshness” rating at rottentomatoes.com): This love story—just like love itself—is too strong to be ignored.
Just how big did Breaking Dawn break? It was the second most lucrative opening of the year (trailing only the $169.2 million tallied by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2) and the fifth biggest weekend opening ever. Granted, it made a little less money than its Twilight predecessor (The Twilight Saga: New Moon clawed in $142.8 million during its opening weekend), but Breaking Dawn’s performance further illustrates that sparkly vampires are not to be messed with.
No surprise that those poor animated penguins from Happy Feet Two never stood a chance. The flightless fowl jitterbugged their way to a cool $22 million—about $117 million off the pace set by Breaking Dawn (and far less than the $41 million the original Happy Feet danced to). But Happy Feet still trounced a bevy of holdovers for second place. Immortals finished third with $12.3 million, Adam Sandler’s Jack and Jill somehow clung to fourth place with $12 million, and the dashing cat Puss in Boots hooked its claws into fifth with another $10.7 mil.
I admit that I’ve never really appreciated the Twilight movies. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never really embraced the concept of a glistening vampire. Perhaps it’s because Taylor Lautner’s abs make me feel insecure. So with that in mind, Twilight fans (and I know there’s at least a few of you out there), tell me what I’m missing.
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