New Moon Update

The teen lovebirds of The Twilight Saga: New Moon drew a record crowd on Thursday night generating the largest opening in box office history for post-midnight shows on the night before the opening day. Summit reported a phenomenal $26.27M in ticket sales for shows starting at 12:01AM early Friday morning surging 18% past the previous record set in mid-July by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince which hauled in $22.2M from its post-midnight shows on a late Tuesday night ahead of its Wednesday opening day. By launching one minute past midnight, distributors can roll the grosses into the opening day figure.

The record before that was set last summer by The Dark Knight which enjoyed $18.5M in its post-midnight launch. Prince's post-midnight tally accounted for a hefty 38% of its $58.2M opening day haul (fourth-best of all-time) and New Moon, also a sequel based on a literary property with a passionate fan base, could play out in a similar fashion. If it does, the Edward-Bella-Jacob love triangle would reach the $60-65M range for Friday making it one of the top three opening days ever.

New Moon's accomplishments are especially impressive given that its November release is during the school year and students, in theory, had to be in class on Friday morning. But the vampire sequel benefited from having advance tickets go on sale nearly three months ahead of time so obsessed fans had plenty of time to snap up all the seats for the first shows prompting sell outs from coast to coast. A massive 3,514 theaters offered New Moon at midnight last night and today it officially opens in 4,024 locations.

Last year's Twilight bowed this same weekend to over $7M in post-midnight sales on its late Thursday night so the sequel saw a nearly-four-fold increase. The first film built its success from the millions of fans of the book series and then expanded bringing new audiences into the franchise's world. Fan frenzy led to enormous demand for the second installment which is now manifesting itself. The full opening day gross for Twilight, including its post-midnights, was $36M which accounted for an abnormally high 52% of its $69.6M opening weekend tally.

New Moon is expected to be even more front-loaded. That should certainly allow the film to break the $100M mark by the end of this weekend.

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Check the UPDATED charts for the Top All-Time Opening Days and Top All-Time Opening Weekends.

For NEW reviews of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Planet 51, 2012 and Fantastic Mr. Fox visit The Chief Report.

Check back on Saturday for an update on Friday's box office results.

Last Updated: November 20, 2009 at 2:15PM ET

Written by Gitesh Pandya