New Moon passes the $1/2 billion mark worldwide in its third weekend

ACTUALS ARE IN: The final domestic box office numbers for its third weekend show that The Twilight Saga: New Moon took in $15,427,628 from 4124 locations with a per theater average of $3,741. These figures include newly released official numbers of $5,114,239 for Friday, $6,480,523 for Saturday, and a 40.9% drop to $3,832,866 Sunday. This increases the film's domestic cumulative total to $255.36M through its first 17 days of release. This is the official tally which, including the actual number for Sunday, has been revised downward by $276K from the previously announced $15.704M. New Moon also took in an estimated $40.7M in foreign markets for an international total of $314.5M and a worldwide cumulative total of $569.9M.


It needs only $2.37M more to pass Star Trek's $257.73M and make the top 5 domestic for 2009. Note that all the films in the top 5 opened in May-July. $21.9M will move New Moon past The Hangover into fourth place. $37.54M will move New Moon past Up into third place for the year. $46.636M will surpass Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to become the #2 film of 2009. At $15M per weekend it can easily finish second for the year.

Here is the reason why this overall number is lower than the one reported by the industry on Sunday. After the Saturday box office totals came in on Sunday morning, the studio estimated what Sunday would be and came up with a weekend projection. That is standard industry procedure. Of course, Sunday and weekend figures can only be estimated at that point.

The actual Sunday numbers weren't known until now. The actual numbers that come in after the weekend are usually not too far off from the estimates made on Sunday. They usually adjust slightly up or down but are rarely far off. In this case, the number was slightly overestimated, meaning that the percentage drop from Saturday to Sunday was slightly more than anticipated and less people went to see New Moon than had been predicted. So the final number is revised downward by $276K or rounded off to $0.28M.
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