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In the modern box office era, there are a few special landmarks that provide delimiters for the greatness of a movie's opening weekend. $30 million is good, but $50 million is great. The real lines of demarcation, however, are the $70 million and $100 million tiers. Only 34 movies have reached the former level, while only a dozen have managed the dramatic feat of the latter. Twilight didn't quite manage that $70 million level, but it's a splitting of hairs. Entering 2008, this title was completely unheralded by mainstream consumers, but it somehow managed a $69.6 million debut. That slots it neatly under all of the $70+ million debuts as the 35th largest opening of all time. What type of odds would Vegas have given you for that 12 months ago at this time?

How this happened is somewhat difficult to quantify. Certainly, the success of Stephenie Meyer's novels is the primary force. Upon the release of the final novel in the Twilight franchise, Breaking Dawn, USA Today declared her to be "the most famous writer you've never heard of." This still may be the case for some of you, but most people who follow box office carefully are all too aware of who she is now. While Meyer herself has gone out of her away to avoid any and all comparisons to J.K. Rowling, this is the analogue she cannot avoid.

The reason is in the book sales. Rowling's success in the Harry Potter is inimitable, of course, but right on the heels of the ending of that franchise, Meyer's novels proved once again that nature abhors a vacuum. With the release of Breaking Dawn in early August, the top five best seller list quickly became Meyer's private playground. By the time of Twilight's release into theaters, her four novels comprised the top four sellers on Amazon. For a period of several months, she toyed with the same accomplishment on USA Today's best sellers list. Her work was neither a flash in the pan nor over-saturated. In point of fact, the Twilight phenomenon peaked at the perfect moment.

As recently as three months prior to the release of the movie, industry expectations for Twilight placed it squarely in the range of The Covenant. The gothic thriller about super-powered boys debuted with $23.2 million, a strong result for such a project with a cast of relative unknowns. Some even argued that Twilight was so close in general premise to 2007's Blood and Chocolate, a film that made a grand total of $3.5 million, that a Covenant-sized opening should be on the high side of expectations. Part of the rationale for this was that the distributor of Twilight, Summit Entertainment, had no experience with blockbusters. Instead, the fledgling studio was considered too green to handle a mega-opening. Such concerns proved utterly baseless.

All Twilight needed was a break and fate was kind enough to offer one through a strange series of circumstances. The impetus was another Top Industry Story of 2008, the Writers' Strike. Because of the lack of new productions at the start of the year, several studios became painfully aware of the fact that their late 2008/early 2009 schedule was threadbare. Warner Bros. was forced to accept that their Summer of 2009 had no potential tentpole releases. With no better options, they dropped back to punt by pushing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from November of 2008 until July 17, 2009.

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