'New Moon' Sets New Ticket Pre-Sale RecordI am in the position again of needing to remind everyone that pre-sale ticket numbers don't, in and of themselves, indicate that much. We saw it with Harry Potter this summer, again with This is It, and it will be borne out one more time this weekend with New Moon.
The Twilight sequel has, according to Deadline Hollywood and Fandango, eclipsed (no pun intended) every other movie in the last ten years for pre-sale tickets. That's still with five days to go, incidentally. Sheepishly, I must admit that I am one of those ticket holders, but only because I also caught Twilight and a midnight screening. Why break with tradition?
Because you can't actually sell more tickets than you have seats, New Moon isn't going to make more money with pre-sales than it would with no pre-sales, provided everyone went ahead and paid at the theater. It's not like they're selling so many tickets that they're building new theaters, merely selling out the available inventory at a faster rate than any other movie Fandango has tracked. With 4,000 theaters and then some, New Moon will be one of the top debuts of the year, but will it beat The Dark Knight, which is fourth on the pre-sale list? No. Not even close.
When This Is It was burning up the pre-sale charts (also, incidentally, at a record-setting pace), it only led to about $100 million in opening weekend receipts around the world. You didn't hear a word about 2012 in this department, and it scaled a $225 million wall internationally. Harry Potter out-pre-sold Transformers, but didn't, in fact, sell more tickets in its opening weekend.
The movie will be huge, and it should be the third or fourth best debut of the year, and it could possibly top Transformers for a three-day haul, but remember how much that made in the two days before its first official weekend.
Here are the top five Fandango pre-sellers, if you're interested:
1 - New Moon
2 - Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
3 - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
4 - The Dark Knight
5 - Twilight
http://www.getthebigpicture.net/blog/2009/11/16/new-moon-sets-new-ticket-pre-sale-record.htmlGuardianFlash and friend will be at 7pm showing on Friday.
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