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This bites. Get it? Ha ha! Bites!

Kim Hollis: The Twilight Saga: New Moon set box office records for midnight sneaks and single day revenue on its way to earning $142.8 million this weekend, the third biggest three-day opening weekend ever. Explain this result, please.

Reagen Sulewski: You know how in every Lovecraft story, there's a character that looks too far into the abyss and goes irretrievably mad as a result? Yeah, I kind of feel like that at this point.

Tom Macy: I really can't explain it, because I honestly don't understand it. It baffles me that a film so universally embraced by the public - or enough of the public - to the point where it's the third highest opening weekend off all time is one I have literally no interest in seeing. I'm a huge sucker for event films. Looking at the list of all time opening weekends I've seen 20 out of the top 30 within the first three days of release. I chalked the popularity of this Twilight business up to the Jonas Brothers crowd going crazy but man, was I wrong. Is it just that people have been wanting movie about romantic vampires in their teens all along? Because if that's the case I'm sure Dracula: The Football Years would have been made a long time ago.





Josh Spiegel: Sigh. I guess my hopes last week were very out there. Based on the crowd that surrounded me on Saturday morning at 8:45 (also known as my entry as Best Husband of the Year), I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed. One day, not far from now, a lot of the people who went crazy for all of these characters are going to wonder what the hell they were thinking. This movie is just...it's obviously a phenomenon of massive proportions, but the fervor is, in my opinion, wildly misplaced. Summit Entertainment should be thrilled, and spend some of the dough on pushing The Hurt Locker as a Best Picture nominee.

Sean Collier: The best explanation that I can come up with is that Stephanie Meyer has created a legion of comic-book style obsessed fans in a previously underserved(ish) demographic. The legions of 10-to-18-year-old girls obsessed with this material is much larger than we estimated, and the horde seems to behave more like Star Wars or Batman fans than, say, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants devotees. It is, of course, a true shame that so many impressionable girls are obsessed with such socially reprehensible material, but so it goes.

Reagen Sulewski: It's never just been the teen audience for this, though - you don't even get Twilight numbers with just teen girls. I think a lot of the credit has to go to timing - the book series peaked in between the first movie and this one and fans of the first film were able to say that they were going to get what they wanted out of the translation to the screen. Which is odd... since absolutely nothing happens in that first film.

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