A lot of people in the film industry have quite
famously opined that
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse has a better chance of blowing up the 2010 box office by sheer temporal positioning than did
The Twilight Saga: New Moon in 2009.
That is in part due to the fact that
New Moon was the only one of the top ten biggest box office openings which did not debut during the summer.
So, for the most part, many have taken it as a given that
Eclipse will probably outperform
New Moon in this year's box office, but at least one source feels otherwise.
Here's what
Box Office Mojo has to say on the issue:
Odds are that
Eclipse won't reach the heights of
New Moon, given the history of closely-timed, serialized sequels.
The Matrix Revolutions,
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End and even
Back to the Future Part III all grossed significantly less than their predecessors. When a second movie is hotly-anticipated after the first movie's success, it's highly unlikely that the next picture will even maintain the momentum (
The Lord of the Rings and
Harry Potter being notable exceptions), and signs from New Moon's run suggest that The Twilight Saga will follow the pattern. New Moon had one of the biggest openings of all time, was extremely front-loaded and probably wasn't as well-liked as the first Twilight: Box Office Mojo readers gave it a "C+," compared to the first movie's "B." Also, the vampire fad could show fatigue by the summer, given the flood of vampire-themed TV shows, movies and paraphernalia in the market.
This is actually a really interesting matter (and not necessarily just because of the issues concerning
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn).
Twilight series fans have certainly proven their staying power over the past few years. The books started coming out roughly five years ago, and the buzz surrounding the series only grows deeper and more defined as time progresses.
BOM has made a good point here that
New Moon's box office intakes were "front loaded," meaning a lot of
Twilight fans went and saw it first thing and early on in the release, but didn't continue to see it as many over-and-over times as they might've with
Twilight. That might not, however, be as crushing of a statistic as this opinion makes it out to be.
Perhaps, instead, you could point to the fact that the first film drew in a lot of the fanbase and that many of
Twilight's viewers were newcomers to the series (who maybe went and saw it as a
result of its grand opening numbers or the film's initial chatter). In that case, it wouldn't be very surprising that the
New Moon viewership came out in a more timely manner.
Even with a front-loaded release,
New Moon proved to be a big player in the box office game for 2009. So, the question is: will
Eclipse bring in the same latitude of moviegoers as did
New Moon?
With the variables pointed to by Box Office Mojo, there are certainly some sequel-related obstacles to consider, but do the historical figures associated with three-quels really apply to this series? Perhaps not. Perhaps the
Twilight series likens more to
LOTR and
Harry Potter than
Matrix.
There's at least one obvious similarity which would beckon such an opinion: the fact that they are all based upon book series which have a built-in and long-standing fanbase as opposed to being off-the-cuff continuances of a popular film series. So, yeah, maybe
Eclipse follows upon
New Moon rather closely in time - and this is not something that most films see success in doing - but there's hardly any chance that
Twilight fans will take a rain check in seeing
Eclipse in theaters, will they?
Another point to consider, and this is more against BOM's analysis than anything else, is the fact that a large amount of
Twilight's audience consists of young adults. A summer release for this demographic would be helpful to them seeing the film (given that school wouldn't be in session).
While BOM certainly goes against the grain and raises some interesting points, it's not altogether convincing that
Eclipse will not fare as well in the box office as
New Moon.
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