New Moon By the Numbers, a Year End Update

According to Box Office Mojo, New Moon moved into the number 4 position of best selling movies of 2009 overtaking this summer’s The Hangover. One thing to note is that the movies that are ahead of New Moon all opened in the spring/summer and recently closed their tallies after a 4-6 month run.

What’s going to be interesting is to see if New Moon will crack the $300,000,000 before it closes out in around March. It’s also going to be interesting to see where Avatar ends up in this mix since it’s tickets are more for the 3-D experience. As usual, in the what does this mean to the average movie goer, Larry explains it all.

E! has an interesting look at “The Year’s Biggest Bombs” only it’s not what you might think. It’s a look at what was spent to make a movie vs. what that movie made back in ticket sales.  Some interesting stats according to E!:

1. New Moon beat Harry Potter. In bang for buck. New Moon made more than 12 times its $50 million budget ($635 million worldwide); Half-Blood Prince “only” made about four times its $250 million price tag.

2. Harry Potter beat everything. The sixth boy-wizard adventure was the year’s overall No. 1 film, with $924 million in the worldwide bank, even if Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was the No. 1 film domestically—and the only one to top $400 milllion stateside.”

In other driving factors, there is the rumor mill. You never know what brings people back to theaters. On the IMDB one person claims to have seen an Eclipse preview right after her showing of New Moon. Mind you she is the ONLY person who seems to have seen this and according to her she wasn’t able to snap any photo with her camera, but can remember every second of this trailer that she saw once with blow-by-blow, detailed accuracy. What’s amazing is how many people on the IMDB reported to racing out to see this, it then went to Twitter, and yep that’s the making of a viral rumor. Nonetheless, viral rumors, no matter how illogical and in this case not true, drive the boxoffice.

Now none of this accounts for piracy, meaning how many people saw the movie without paying. According to the New York Times, Twilight is number 5 on the list of most pirated movies in 2009. Star Trek holds the number 1 position. No clue where New Moon will fall in the 2010 list.

No matter where New Moon ends up, regardless it’s quite an accomplishment for a film that is predominantly female box office driven.