Holiday Box Office: Eclipse, Airbender Find Their Fans

Rathbone rules! Two movies with actor Jackson Rathbone took the top slots in the July 4 marathon weekend at the North American box office, earning about $116 million in tandem over the Friday-to-Monday period and nearly $250 million since June 29. Rathbone plays the decidedly supporting roles of Jasper Hale in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe in The Last Airbender, so he probably wasn't essential to the imposing numbers those two movies registered over the past few days. Still, it's got to look great on the 25-year-old actor's résumé.

For non-Rathbonians, the stars of the two movies were the franchises: Stephenie Meyer's four Twilight novels and Nickelodeon's animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. Both films entered the marketplace with loads of hype and, for industry prognosticators, some aspects of suspense. Would Airbender conquer its cataclysmic reviews and find its audience? And would the new Twilight entry, ahem, eclipse the opening gross of its predecessor, New Moon?

Twilight fans, vamps and lycanthrope lovers alike made gigantic hits of the first two films in the series, and sure enough, Eclipse opened with a roar: June 30 was the biggest Wednesday in North American box office history, with $68.5 million, including a record-breaking $30 million from June 29's midnight shows. Still, the Wednesday take was below the $72.7 million that New Moon hauled in on the Friday before last Thanksgiving, which remains the all-time best for an opening day. The $68.5 million was about what Eclipse earned over the next three days, suggesting that fans saw it early but not often. The film will likely take in about $175 million by the end of July 5, a bit less than the $178.9 million amassed by New Moon in its first weekend. It's also less than what Spider-Man 2 — the last blockbuster released on the Wednesday before a Sunday, July 4 — grossed in its first five days back in 2004. So Eclipse may not be a world beater, but it's in excellent company.

The film's distributor, Summit, can take heart in other numbers. The most important one is $68 million, the relatively modest price tag on its budget. (Spider-Man 2 cost about three times as much.) Eclipse also pulled in about $100 million abroad, and like the first two films in the series can be expected to earn more from foreign venues than those at home. For this threequel, 65% of the audience was female (as opposed to 80% for New Moon), and 45% were under 21 (as opposed to New Moon's 50%). And they are a rabid bunch. A blonde of our acquaintance, Carol Carey, who's somewhat over 21, spent the weekend monitoring Eclipse's daily numbers as if they were the latest scores in a playoff game of her favorite sports franchise, the New York/Jersey Giants. Now that the holiday's over, Carol will be seeing Eclipse again, as will many other admirers of the acting styles of Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner.

Few critics admired M. Night Shyamalan's work as adapter and director of The Last Airbender; Rotten Tomatoes compiled a pitiful 8% approval rating. And yet, as I and every other critic can tell you, we can't make people stay away from the big movies we revile any more than we can get people to see the little movies we like. (Another trade secret: We don't care if we're "wrong" on a heavily advertised franchise movie.) Airbender's target audience was kids, mostly the boy fans of the TV show, and enough of them dragged their parents to theaters and made them pay the 3-D surcharge to give the film a decent launch. Whether it has the sturdy legs needed to warrant a sequel is anyone's guess. "I took my son to see it this weekend," one industry insider told me in an e-mail, "and I was so annoyed, I started posting tidbits on my FB page during the film." Way to vent your rage, dear Insider — but you did buy two tickets for the thing.

For the remaining kids and kids at heart, The Karate Kid passed $150 million in its fourth week; and in its third, Toy Story 3 earned another $42.2 million from Friday to Monday, making it Pixar's second biggest domestic hit, after 2003's Finding Nemo. If July 5's figures hold, TS3 will have reached the $300 million plateau in exactly as many days, 18, as Shrek 2 did six years ago — though with far fewer admissions because of inflation and the 3-D fee. Expect TS3 to pass Nemo this month but end up short of the $441.2 million taken in by the all-time animation winner, Shrek 2.

The holiday films had something for every demographic: young boys, teenage girls, ladies of a certain age and even rowdy males of the Adam Sandler persuasion. Sandler's Grown Ups cadged $19.1 million in its second week, and the Judd Apatow–produced Get Him to the Greek, starring Jonah Hill, held on well in its fifth. But it was Cyrus, in which Hill plays the willfully weird son of John C. Reilly's new girlfriend, that was the surprise entry in the top 10. The low-budget semi-comedy from mumblecore directors Jay and Mark Duplass expanded to 77 theaters and crept into 10th place with $1 million. That's not a figure worthy of a Jackson Rathbone movie, but it's a hopeful one for an indie film. As Cyrus gets into more theaters, it may keep audiences chilled and amused for the rest of the summer.

Here are the July 5 estimates of the top-grossing pictures in North American theaters over the four-day weekend, as reported by Box Office Mojo:

1. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, $82.5 million; $175.3 million, first six days
2. The Last Airbender, $53.15 million; $70.5 million, first five days
3. Toy Story 3, $42.2 million; $301.05 million, third week
4. Grown Ups, $26.5 million; $85.1 million, second week
5. Knight and Day, $14 million; $49.3 million, second week
6. The Karate Kid, $11.5 million; $155 million, fourth week
7. The A-Team, $4.3 million; $70.4 million, fourth week
8. Get Him to the Greek, $1.7 million; $57.9 million, fifth week
9. Shrek Forever After, $1.3 million; $232.6 million, seventh week
10. Cyrus, $1 million; $1.7 million, third week