Box Office Mojo: Eclipse, 30 Million Record Setting Midnight Tally

According to BoxOffice Mojo:

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse ripped into the record books with its midnight launch, grossing over $30 million at more than 4,000 theaters. That surpassed The Twilight Saga: New Moon‘s previous benchmark of $26.3 million. Included in Eclipse‘s sum was a new IMAX midnight milestone of over $1 million at 192 venues, topping Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen‘s $959,000.

The vampre(sic) romance sequel had already cast the widest opening net ever, biting into a whopping 4,416 locations (more theaters are expected to be added on Friday). Iron Man 2 previously held that title with 4,380 locations, while Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince holds the record for highest location count ever at 4,455. Eclipse‘s count includes 193 IMAX venues, which is just shy of Shrek Forever After‘s 194 record.”

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The thing to keep in mind is that this figure only counts sales in the USA made through 3:00am this morning. It does not count the sales that are picked up during the day today through 11:59pm this evening.  Once those figures come in tomorrow afternoon to reflect the first day’s complete total that number should be $150,000,000. This will solidly put Eclipse opening in the top ten movies of the year.

The big question is going to be if Eclipse can get to the 300,000,000 million mark. New Moon was just shy at circa 296,000,000. No matter what it is going to continues to smash records for what is a predominately female driven enterprise.