David Slade, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
TWILIGHT: ECLIPSE Dethroned by DESPICABLE ME: Box Office
Starring Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, and Taylor Lautner; directed by David Slade; written by Melissa Rosenberg (from Stephenie Meyer’s best selling novel), and featuring Bryce Dallas Howard, Kellan Lutz, Ashley Greene, Xavier Samuel, Dakota Fanning, Peter Facinelli, Jackson Rathbone, Elizabeth Reaser, Nikki Reed, and Anna Kendrick, among others, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse grossed an estimated $11m — on the no. 2 spot — at the North American box office on Friday, according to figures found at Box Office Mojo.
Eclipse’s ten-day total currently stands at $214.66m, the sixth highest among 2010’s domestic releases.
The third installment of the Twilight Saga series will pass DreamWorks’ animated 3D feature How to Train Your Dragon ($216.5m) today, and will quite possibly be ahead of another DreamWorks animated 3D feature, Shrek Forever After ($233m), by Sunday night.
In terms of attendance figures Eclipse will surely be ahead of both films, as How to Train Your Dragon and Shrek Forever After have the advantage of 3D surcharges that inflate their box-office numbers.
As previously reported, Eclipse is currently the 10th fastest release to reach $200m on Box Office Mojo’s chart (not adjusted for inflation). In 2010, only Pixar’s Toy Story 3 is ahead on the chart, having crossed the $200m milestone with $208m on Day 9.
If inflation is taken into account, Eclipse would then be down one spot at no. 11, following the Sam Raimi-Tobey Maguire 2002 effort Spider-Man (with $202m on Day 9).
The top three 2010 releases are Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, Lee Unkrich’s Toy Story 3 (about to become the year’s number one film at the box office), and Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2.
Photo: The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (Kimberley French / Summit Entertainment)