The holiday movie season is off to a record-breaking start after blockbusters ‘Twilight: Breaking Dawn –Part 2’ and “Skyfall” powered the biggest Thanksgiving weekend ever at the box office, TheWrap said.
With Oscar front-runner “Lincoln” continuing to over-perform in terms of expectations and awards hopeful “Life of Pi” off to a strong start, the overall box office hit $288 million and easily eclipsed the previous standard of $268 million set in 2009.
The “Twilight” vamps and vampires are making it a long and lucrative goodbye. Summit Entertainment’s franchise finale took in another $65 million over the five days and stayed at No. 1 in its second week. Its overall domestic gross is $226 million. "Breaking Dawn 2" will take in $43 million between Friday and Sunday, the best ever second-weekend for a "Twilight" film.
It added another $97.4 million from 73 territories and has taken in $350.8 million overseas, giving it a worldwide total of $577 million in two weeks. Summit parent Lionsgate's international unit went over the $1 billion mark for the first time and put the studio at over $2 billion worldwide, another first.
The success of “Breaking Dawn 2” makes Lionsgate’s $412 million acquisition of Summit in January look pretty good right now.
