Defying conventional wisdom that teenage boys control the box office, box office analysts are predicting record crowds -- mostly of teenage
girls -- for this weekend's opening of Summit Entertainment's
The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Today's (Friday)
Los Angeles Times said that the film will likely sell about $90 million worth of tickets and could possibly cross the $100-million mark, putting it just behind the year's biggest ticket
seller,
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke quoted sources as saying that the movie's midnight take may have exceeded that of
The Dark Knight. Both
Transformers and
Knight were aimed squarely at young men, while the
Twilight movie is aimed at young women. Although today's ticket sales are likely to be enormous, Saturday's are likely to fall off dramatically, if the original
Twilight is any indication. That movie saw a decline of 41 percent on its second day, then drop 62 percent on its second weekend, despite the fact that it, like its sequel, went into its second week with the benefit of the Thanksgiving holiday. The vampire/werewolf love-triangle will be doing battle with the second week of the end-of-the-world saga
2012, which is expected to lose more than half its opening-weekend audience, but still perform quite nicely. Two new films (besides
New Moon) opening wide,
Planet 51 and
The Blind Side, are iffy propositions.