Well, The Twilight Saga: New Moon rode $26.3 million in midnight showings and a staggering Friday one-day opening of $72.7 million to an opening weekend of $140.7 million. How unfathomable is that!? I mean, that's the third-highest opening weekend in HISTORY. Falling just short of The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3, New Moon's opening weekend was bonkers.

I originally went to try to see the movie on Saturday afternoon at about 3:00. Of course, that showing was sold out. In fact, every showing between 3:30 and 7:00pm was sold out, and the 7 shows were going FAST. Given that my local theater had three screens devoted to the film, that means they sold out at least eight screenings, and Saturday wasn't even the movie's big day!

The overflow crowds at Twilight meant that a lot of people were killing time in other movies; in my case, I ducked into 2012 (third place, $26.5 million).

The Blind Side (second place, $34.5 million) was another beneficiary of the Twilight mania, as it was the only other movie in the theater that sold out of a showing while I was there. Not only was that a record high opening for Sandra Bullock, it was also a record high opening for a sports drama. I can only imagine that's what the parents went to see while the kids were waiting to get their vampire fix.

The weekend's other opening film, Planet 51, underperformed a bit. The movie grossed only $12.6 million this weekend, good for fourth place. It barely beat out A Christmas Carol (fifth place, $12.23 million), which is losing steam in the US at a quick pace considering the high hopes Buena Vista had for it and its big budget.

Precious: Based On The Novel "Push" By Sapphire, dropped to sixth place in its second week of wide release, with a weekend gross of $11 million. With backing from both Oprah and Tyler Perry, this independent film is going to be a big money-maker for Lionsgate, as the screenings are packed for this one and it has a very small $10 million budget.

Once you get past Precious, the box office takes drop off precipitously. Apparently, the Twilight bump only helped out the top five or six movies, and nothing else. The Men Who Stare At Goats, for example, took seventh place on only $2.77 million (though it did make its budget back). Couples Retreat (eighth place, $1.95 million), The Fourth Kind (ninth place, $1.73 million), and Law Abiding Citizen (tenth place, $1.615 million) certainly didn't get any kind of a Twilight bump, I guess because they're all the wrong genre or they've already been seen.

Coming out this weekend is a nice little trifecta of films, just in time for Thanksgiving Day. Expanding is The Fantastic Mr. Fox, from the fertile mind of Wes Anderson. (I re-watched The Royal Tenenbaums last night, and it was incredible.)

Emerging from the darkness with a sword in hand is Ninja Assassin, which I'm really looking forward to even if it's not a remake of the old Sho Kosugi movie like I thought it was. (I was thinking of Enter The Ninja.) Also out this weekend will be Old Dogs, teaming Robin Williams and John Travolta as two old guys who somehow...

You know what? Let's just pretend that movie isn't coming out, shall we? I don't want to think about how sad Robin Williams career has been the past 15 years.