In a surprise to no one, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse grabbed the top spot at the box office like it was the last piece of cake this weekend, earning $69 million.  That was enough for the third highest Independence Day weekend opening (behind Spider-Man 2 and Transformers), and the seventh highest five-day opening, with $161 million.  Long story short, it’s doing about as well as everyone expected with few surprises either way.

The Last Airbender managed to earn $40.7 million, despite some of the worst reviews I’ve ever seen, and actually outgrossed Prince of Persia‘s four-day star by 50 percent.  I can only hope this increases the possibility that Shyamalan will eventually have to face an angry mob.

Elsewhere, there weren’t too many surprises.  Knight and Day reached $45 million ($70 million worldwide), which doesn’t sound too bad, but it also has a listed production budget (not including marketing) of $117 million.  It’d be nice if the lesson they took from this flop was that maybe making a movie that looks like 10 movies we’ve already seen isn’t the “safe bet” they always thought.  But let’s be serious, the lesson they take will probably be “CAMERON DIAZ’S HEAD SHOULD HAVE BEEN BIGGER ON THE POSTER.  PEOPLE MUST NOT HAVE KNOWN BIG STARS WERE IN THIS MOVIE.”

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WOOHOOO!  FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND!  TIME TO PARTY!  Then when we’re hungover, we can go see… uh… Sparkly vampires?  Boy wizards?  Hmm.  Opening this weekend (trailers after the jump):

Twilight Saga: Eclipse
I’m going to go see this weekend and find the hottest girl in the theater.  Then, I’m going to follow her home, break in through her window, and just sit there staring at her while she sleeps.  If she wakes up and catches me and starts screaming, I’m just going to cover her mouth while I say, “What?  I thought this was what you wanted.”

The Last Airbender
Sample reviews:

• “Shyamalan has made a dull, boring, poorly acted, limply written and thoroughly unappealing fantasy, featuring bland characters locked in a struggle of no interest.”
• “’The Last Airbender’ is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.”
• “Let’s just be honest: M. Night Shyamalan is an idiot.”

However, everyone hated Jonah Hex too, and as I’ve pointed out, with the right attitude, that movie is hilarious and entertaining as hell.  Could that be true of Last Airbender?  Somehow I doubt it.  I tried that with Lady in the Water, and it’s one of the few movies I’ve ever seen where getting high first actually made it worse.  M. Shyalami can harsh your mellow from afar.

Love Ranch
Joe Pesci plays a pimp, Helen Mirren is a whore, I really want to see this, and of course it’s only be opening in limited release.  Ugh.  I was pretty much sold as soon as I heard Pesci would be a pimp and Helen Mirren’s character “stomps on the throat of a misbehaving prostitute,” but curiously, the reviews have been pretty bad so far.  All I know is that the guy who decided to open a movie with “ranch” in the title the same weekend Twilight opens is an evil genius.

Happy Fourth

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You have to figure a movie that gets mentioned during a congressional hearing would make a c*ntload of dough, and you’d be right.  Being an abstinence parable doesn’t mean you have to abstain from cash money, son. According to early estimates, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse has bumped Dark Knight down a notch on the list of biggest opening days.  In a related story, Dark Knight is now covered in cat fur.

Summit Entertainment’s The Twilight Saga: Eclipse earned an estimated $68.5 million its first day which is a new record for a Wednesday opening, surpassing previous record holder Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ($62 million). The third installment debuted in a record 4,416 theaters.
While the opening day is not as big as The Twilight Saga: New Moon‘s record of $72.7 million, if the estimate holds it would still be the second-best single day and opening day ever and would knock The Dark Knight ($67.2 million) to third. [ComingSoon]

New Moon eventually topped out at $709.9 million worldwide, while Dark Knight went on to gross more than a billion dollars, in much the same way that a Twihard can lift a bus if there’s a sandwich under it, but tire after walking up a few stairs.   I kid, I kid.  In any case, Stephenie Meyer was said to be flattered by the huge opening, writing, “It’s a very big opening day.  Our opening day was massive.  It was so big, it was scary.”

Descriptive!

RELATED ASYLUM POLL: Under what circumstances would you watch Twilight?

President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court is Elena Kagan, and if it were me, I’d vote to confirm solely on the basis her being a total hottie. Luckily, there are people in congress taking this more seriously.  People like Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who today demanded to know whether Kagan preferred obsessive, stalkerish-but-platonic pedophiliac vampires with sparkly white skin, or greasy ethnic werewolves with hot blood and glistening abs. (Video of the exchange after the jump).

“You had an incredibly grueling day yesterday and you did incredibly well, but I guess it means you missed the midnight debut of the third Twilight movie last night,” Sen. Klobuchar said. “We did not miss it in our household, and it culminated in three 15-year-old girls sleeping over at 3 a.m.”

“I didn’t see that,” Kagan said.

“I keep wanting to ask you about the famous case of Edward v. Jacob, or The Vampire v. The Werewolf,” Sen. Klobuchar said, opening her questioning with a bit of lightheartedness.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Kagan said with a laugh. [source]

OIL SPILL SCHMOIL SCHMILL, TELL ME ABOUT THE THE JOHNSON & JOHNSON THEY USE TO GREASE UP TAYLOR LAUTNER’S SIX PACK, AMIRITE? I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THESE BANKS, BUT EVERY TIME THAT LITTLE PETER PUFFER COMES ONSCREEN I HAVE A  MELTDOWN ALL OVER THE SEAT CUSHION, GNOME SAYIN??  WHAT? WHAT’D I SAY?  RELAX, WE’RE JUST A COUPLE OF GALS HAVIN’ LADY TALK OVER HERE.

Going to midnight film screenings in the middle of the week… making Twilight jokes…  From what it sounds like, being a Senator is a lot like being a blogger. (Oh, and for the record, Kagan declined to answer.)

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^{(What’s this? Oh, just a fan-made picture of Taylor Lautner and his infant lover Renesmee.  Nope, nothing weird about that…)}

Today in shocking news you’ll never believe, it turns out women obsessed with books written at a sixth-grade level about a 100-year-old vampire who falls in love with a sullen 16-year-old and stares at her while she sleeps might not have the healthiest relationships.  Fill the hole in my heart with Twinkies, LA Times:

Chrystal Johnson didn’t think there was anything unhealthy about her all-consuming fixation with “The Twilight Saga” — until she discovered it was sucking the life out of her marriage.
“I found poems my husband had written in his journal about how I had fallen for a ‘golden-eyed vampire,’ ” says Johnson, a 31-year-old accountant from Mesa, Arizona.

Man, that must’ve been embarrassing.  I know how mortified I was when my girlfriend discovered my journal. “Dear Diary: I haven’t written in you much lately on account of not having a vagina.  Once I grow one, I promise to compose three poems about it.”

“This is the first time I’ve been this passionate about anything,” says Kelli Chavez, a 39-year-old mom who drove in from Sylmar. “I’ve read each of the books at least eight or nine times and I’ve watched each of the movies over 300 times apiece.”

I realize idiots are prone to hyperbole, but if we were to take her claims at face value, the first Twilight film was 121 minutes long.  If she’d watched it 300 times, that would come to 36,300 minutes, or 605 hours, a little more than 25 days.  Add in the second movie (130 minutes), that’s a total of 1,255 hours spent watching Twilight films.  Which brings me to my next point: this chick is a liar.  But have you ever noticed a lot of these Twilight superfans are Mexican?  It’s like they put horchata in there or something.

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