The final US box office numbers from the weekend have now come in, and it turns out that people underestimated Twilight: New Moon's $140.7m predicted haul. The actual figure, which has been confirmed, was $142.8m worth of business from Friday through to Sunday, which is, by some distance, the biggest ever opening weekend for November (in fact, for any month outside of summer blockbuster season), and the third biggest opening of all time.

Sit back and digest that for a second. Of every movie ever released in the world, only The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3 have opened to more money. Star Wars, Harry Potter, Transformers, X-Men, Pirates Of The Caribbean, Shrek and an assortment of other big franchises all trail Twilight 2, and now the question is whether the film has the legs to break many more records.

Our feeling on this is that it probably hasn't, but will still do incredibly well. We'd expect a 60-65% fall in business for next weekend, which will still bring the movie a good $50-55m of change, and our current prediction is that the film will end up somewhere around the $320m mark at the box office. That's still a staggering sum of money, but how successful it is from here depends very much on repeat business, which the presence of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart pretty much guarantees for a week or two yet.

Will it, though, break the $402m that Transformers 2 made in the US to make it the biggest film of the year? If we had to call it right now, we suspect not, but there's every chance we could be proven very wrong on this.

After all, the competition is quite light in the weeks ahead, which will work in New Moon's favour. Ninja Assassin this weekend isn't likely to take too much business from Twilight, Transylmania the week after isn't going to do it too much damage, and we wonder if it's the likes of Avatar and Sherlock Holmes that will finally batter it down at the box office.

In short: expect Twilight mania to continue for a good number of weeks yet...