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?

^{(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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When it comes to Twilight, my surprise sensors have already been burned out by Edward panties, Twilight tours, and the home made Bella womb made of felt, such that these new Twilight credit cards registered barely a blip on the WTF meter.  Twilight credit cards?  Sure, why not.

The exclusive Twilight Saga: Eclipse MYPLASH Prepaid MasterCard reloadable prepaid gift cards [holy modifiers, Batman!] are the newest merchandising phenomenon sprung from the Stephenie Meyer franchise. The gift cards will be available nationwide July 1, the day after the new movie opens. [RiskyBusiness]

Prepaid?  So, basically, it’s just like regular money, but gayer?  Dammit, I’ll never stifle this crushing depression and cat fancy on my salary alone! Anyway, it’s sad how inured to this we’ve become, but these all made a sick sort of sense to me; of course Twihards would want an Edward Cullen credit card.  That is, all of it made sense except for this:

Edward or Jacob I could see, but who the hell is that?  And no, I’m not going to look it up (the source file on Hollywood Reporter was named “three guys,” which tells me they didn’t know either).  I just love the idea that there’s a Twilight fan out there so lonely and depressed that she just assumes she’s not going to get her first choice of fictional, platonic, boyfriend and has to settle, even in her fantasy.  “Hello, Mysplash?  Yeah, could I get the Bieber-themed foppish goth remake of West Side Story with extra finger snaps, please?  Thanks, and hurry.  I have ice cream to buy.”

If you watched Kinsey or Dreamgirls or Gods and Monster (for which Bill Condon won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay), you probably thought, “Gee, that’s great, but where are the snorkeling vampires, the c-sections, the wolf-on-baby love affairs?”  Well you’re in luck, because Summit has officially announced that Condon will direct the final chapter in the Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn, as translated from Stephenie Meyer’s original elementary schoolese.  How say you, press release?

“Bringing Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Breaking Dawn’ to the screen requires a graceful and intelligent hand and we believe Bill Condon is exactly the right steward, having shown equal and abundant talents of immense creativity and subtle sensitivity,” said Erik Feig, President of Production and Acquisitions, for Summit Entertainment.

Added author Stephenie Meyer, “I’m so thrilled that Bill wants to work with us. I think he’s going to be a great fit, and I’m excited to see what he does with the material.”

“I’m very excited to get the chance to bring the climax of this saga to life on-screen. As fans of the series know, this is a one-of-a-kind book – and we’re hoping to create an equally unique cinematic experience,” said Bill Condon.

Yes, it takes a certain grace and a subtle sensitivity (as opposed to my own brand of overbearing, ostentatious sensitivity) to bring to the big screen a book with such plot points as:

The baby has telepathy, by the way, so everybody can read its thoughts while it’s in the womb, and it turns out to have an essentially adult mind. …In a moment that demands to be shown on the silver screen, Edward gives Bella an emergency C-section with his teeth.

Oh, let’s not forget the challenge of filming the baby itself:

The other challenge of course is Renesmee [Editor's Note: AHAHAHAHA!], Bella’s half-vampire, half-human daughter who is able to read, talk, run and hunt despite being a toddler. Producer Wyck Godfrey says “It’s certainly going to be visual effects in some capacity along with an actor. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being a full CG creation, but it also may be a human shot on a soundstage that then is used to shrink down.”

So basically, an Academy Award winner is directing the sparkly vampire version of Little Man.   How could that not be awesome?  I can’t wait to see how Kristen Stewart decides to play the scene in which her unborn vampire baby severs her spine.  Ten bucks says she plays it like really bad heartburn.  She’s such a subtly sensitive actress.

"Who's the new guy?" "That's Pagoda Cullen. 300 years ago, I got stabbed in the stomach during a bar fight in Calcutta. He carried me to the hospital on his back."

As if Lady in the Water wasn’t proof enough that M. Night Pajamalawn has horrible taste, he also recently said this:

“I would’ve loved to be– I love the series, and Catherine [Hardwicke's] movie, it was one of my favorite movies of that year,” he said. “Really, I thought tonally, it was a perfect movie. I called her up after I saw ‘Twilight’ and was like ‘That was amazing.’ So I’m a big fan.” [MTV]

So two kids with nothing in common other than being pale and seemingly unable to move their lips when they talk fall in love and stand around looking like they have heartburn for two hours.  That’s a “perfect movie?”  Sorry, I’m being unfair.  It also had vampire baseball and Cam Gigandet.

It’s quite possible Manny was just pandering because he was at the Kids Choice Awards, but MTV wondered if this means he’s campaigning to direct the next Twilight movie.  Which, by the way, is Breaking Dawn, the one with the vampire snorkeling and the super-powered, telepathic, half-vampire, adult-brained fetus delivered via vamp-teeth c-section, not to mention a werewolf-on-baby love story (the moral of the story being you can’t let ethnic wolves around your sparkling white babies because they’ll try to hump them).  And why wouldn’t he want to direct that?  His last few movies have been major flops, it makes sense he’d want to do something which is damn-near flop proof (unlike my wang).  An M.Night Shyamalan movie about CGI vampire babies — can you even imagine??

Possible spoiler alert: the telepathic vampire fetus was undead the whole time.

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