This week we will be looking at the weekend box office as well as the 5-day holiday, which includes totals for Wednesday through Sunday. There were some interesting developments regarding the international box office scene as well, so this will be a jumbo sized report. New releases barely made a blip, it was the holdovers that led this weekend to the highest grossing Thanksgiving weekend ever.

The Twilight Saga:  New Moon continued to dominate on the domestic and international side. Playing on over 4,000 screens, it grossed $42.5 Million domestically. Over the five day stretch, it grossed $66 Million. No matter your thoughts on the movie, you have to admit we are witnessing a cultural phenomenon unfold in real-time.  Its domestic cumulative take for 10 days now stands at $230.7 Million.

Nipping at the heels of New Moon was The Blind Side. The movie grossed $40.1 Million for the weekend, and $57.5 Million for the five day, with that weekend total being higher than its opening weekend total of $34 Million. Wide releases rarely see an increase in ticket sales from one weekend to the next so this is unusual. This movie is getting exceptionally positive word of mouth, which is bringing more people into the theaters — a topic we discussed on the most recent edition of The Flickcast podcast.

The Blind Side drove over the $100 Million mark as well. Not too shabby for a family friendly film made for around $30 Million. I’m also starting to hear the “O” word casually mentioned regarding this film, as in Oscar. Sandra Bullock seems to be edging her way into consideration for best actress.

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Last week I mentally predicted that New Moon would come in around the $80 Million mark. Obviously, there is a reason that I am not in the business of box office predictions. New Moon grossed over $140 Million during its opening weekend, and broke a few records along the way. Fangirls (and a few fanboys) showed that they are an emerging force to be reckoned with, as New Moon ($72.7 Million) broke the opening day record previously held by The Dark Knight ($67.2 Million.)

According to Entertainment Weekly, over 80% of the ticket sales were from women, a truly rare occurrence. Although the film was critically drummed, (currently 29% on Rotten Tomatoes) audiences gave it an A- cinemascore, indicating that they were very happy with the film. The film opened on a massive 4,000+ screens, and averaged over $34,900 per screen. There was a drop off from Friday to Saturday of about 40%.

Also of note: New Moon now has the 3rd biggest opening weekend ever behind The Dark Knight and Spiderman 3. Its midnight screening averages on Friday morning garnered over $26M, setting a new record for that. The world box office take was over $258 Million. Director Chris Weitz must feel vindicated after the disastrous box office performance of The Golden Compass, his last directorial effort.

Early estimates show that The Blind Side had an opening weekend gross of $34.5 Million, which is nothing to sneeze at. This marks the best opening ever for Sandra Bullock, just behind last summer’s The Proposal. The film also got a remarkable A+ cinemascore, which means it will start getting some seriously good word of mouth. Expect it to remain in the top ten for a long time.

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Coming off of the astounding numbers from the midnight performance of The Twilight Saga: New Moon (nearly $25 Million) comes a trailer for the next Robert Pattinson/Summit Entertainment project entitled Remember Me.

In the film, Pattinson plays a young New Yorker who is fed up with the glamorous life as son of a rich father (played by Pierce Brosnon, also doing an American accent). From there, the broody Pattinson meets a young quirky girl (Emilie De Ravin), who eats her desert before eating meals. They fall in love, and a love triangle between a werewolf begins live happily.

The film is set to hit theaters on March 12th, 2010, which should be just enough time to start up the marketing machine for the third film in the Twilight series, Eclipse. The success of this film will be interesting to watch, as New Moon is expected to make nearly $100 Million in it’s first weekend.

Does that money come from fans of the Twilight series, or just Pattinson and his glittery skin? Check out the trailer for Remember Me after the jump and decide for yourself.

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While Twilight was a guilty pleasure, its sequel New Moon just made me feel guilty. Guilty for paying a sitter, guilty for the gas I wasted, and guilty for buying into the Twilight phenomenon to begin with. A wretched excursion into franchise baiting, New Moon is flat out an embarrassment for everyone involved.

Briefly, if you don’t know the story of the sequel, Bella Swan is a mortal in love with a vampire, Edward Cullen. Towards the beginning of New Moon, Edward realises that it is too dangerous for Bella to continue seeing him, so he pretends that he doesn’t love her anymore and disappears. Bella behaves like a petulant infant and doesn’t leave her room for months because she is a narcissistic, co-dependent teenager.

When she finally emerges after months of alienating friends and family, she sidles up to Jacob, a local boy of Native American descent, who also is a werewolf. Bella then becomes co-dependent on Jacob, because that is what she does. She also becomes a thrill seeker, because whenever she endangers her life (via cliff diving, motorcycling, etc) she sees a floating spectre of Edward pleading for her to quit engaging in said risky behavior. In her melodramatic mind, this is how she can be close to her beloved Edward, if only for a second. That’s a healthy depiction of true love, right?

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With a new moon arriving this past Monday, and a film called New Moon arriving in theaters this Friday, it was only expected that the vengeful internet gods would take this week as time to spoof the film based on Stephanie Meyer’s book.

Saturday Night Live was one of the most recent groups to jump on spoofing the highly popular book/movie series, and now it looks like our pals at College Humor have done the same. What’s one thing that can trump a vampire and a werewolf? Three wolves…and a moon.

For those unaware, there is a phenomenon moving across the country, a phenomenon in which people everywhere think that wearing a shirt with three wolves howling at the moon makes them “cool” or “badass”. This trailer proves that they may have been right all along.

Check out the video after the jump, starring the lovely Aubrey Plaze from NBC’s Parks and Recreation. Enjoy.

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This week, Chris and Matt are joined by special guest Rick Marshall, editor of MTV’s Splashpage site, to talk about movies, tv, comics, games and all things geek. Among the topics covered are what holiday movies the three are looking forward to such as Kick-Ass and Sherlock Holmes, Avatar, cool video game releases, Thor casting, the performance of 2012 at the box office, the upcoming release of The Twilight Saga: New Moon and a whole lot more.

As usual, the guys made some cool picks for you to check out this week including Rick’s pick of the upcoming Warner Bros. action flick Ninja Assasin, Matt’s pick of the classic Bruce Willis action/romance film Die Hard and Chris’ dual picks of the Chuck Norris action film The Octagon (shown at right) and AMC’s currently running reboot The Prisoner, starring Ian McKellan and Jim Caviezal.

As always, if you have comments, questions, critiques or offers of sponsorship, feel free to hit us up in the comments, on Twitter and at Facebook, MySpace or via email.

In a crazy, mixed-up world where something like New Moon Underwear and New Moon Chocolate has enough of a demand for mass production, it was only inevitable that the ticket pre-sales for the movie itself, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, would be astronomical. According to Fandango, that is, indeed, the case.

Though the film doesn’t open until November 20th (This Friday), tickets are already on sale. As of Saturday, November 14th at 8:00PM, the film had already broken the record for most pre-sales of the last 10 years. Here’s the list of the top five, for comparison.

Fandango’s Top 5 Advance Ticket-Sellers:

1. New Moon (2009)
2. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005)
3. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
4. The Dark Knight (2008)
5. Twilight (2008)

Though this is no surprise to the ticket-selling empire, as they already have a New Moon fan site embedded in their network, this is still a bit of a shock to those who have yet to jump onto the “Twilight” bandwagon. At the rate that advanced ticket sales went, it’s quite likely that New Moon will break $100M this weekend, and could very well be on the way to taking on, and perhaps surpassing, such other heavy-hitters as Spider-Man 3 and The Dark Knight.

Every great romance needs a great soundtrack. So one huge problem I had with Twilight (other than the overacting, terrible script, and all the screaming fans around me in the theater) was the music. This movie was part of a pop culture sensation, and the filmmakers had the chance to entwine the romance on screen with some amazing tunes to culture its pre-teen audience. “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” by Iron and Wine was really the only standout track on the soundtrack to me, while Paramore and Linkin Park seemed like obvious choices for the time in which the film came out, and while these bands added to the angsty feeling of teen romance, they just didn’t do it for me.

Luckily, the film’s sequel, New Moon, looks like it’s got a killer soundtrack in the works. Most of the choices are a bit surprising, like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Grizzly Bear, but it’ll be exciting to see how these add to the feeling of New Moon, which looks far more mature and evolved than its predecessor.

By combining the likes of Death Cab for Cutie, Thom Yorke, and Lupe Fiasco, hopefully the romance between Bella, Edward, and Jacob will be a little bit more believable, and easier on the ears.

New Moon hits theaters November 20th. To satiate your thirst for all things vampire, the soundtrack comes out October 20th, giving you a month with these tracks before the film’s release. You can check out the full track listing for The Twlight Saga: New Moon soundtrack after the jump.

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Since last week’s Comic-Con in San Diego, many of the millions of Twilight fans have been anxious to get a glimpse at what the members of the New Moon panel got to see in the legendary Hall H. Most of that footage probably won’t be leaked online for some time, but one thing we do get is an image of the illustrious vampire clan, the Volturi, from the new film.

The Volturi, according to Twlight lore, is one of the oldest vampire clans, operating from the city of Volterra, Italy, eating people and hunting werewolves whenever they choose. In New Moon, Edward rushes to the clan for a solution, which is when we get the first appearance of the dark group. Don’t expect to see much of them, as the Volturi have a more prominent role in Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in the series. Check out the image in full after the jump.

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In the world of young adult fantasy, you could make the argument that Harry Potter, and his cinematic incarnation Daniel Radcliffe, still reign supreme. However, in recent years, another young man has made great strides up that hill of tween fandom and has become a major player and a force to be reckoned with. I’m talking, of course, about Twilight’s Edward Cullen, as played by Robert Pattinson.

So, who’s more popular? Who do thirteen-year-old girls love more? Its hard to say. But one thing you can say about these two actors is that they don’t seem to like each others movies very much — at least according to this video from last night’s Jimmy Fallon Show.

Even with all the apparent bad feelings, rest assured both franchises will still be around for many years to come. Because no matter what actors, critics or the man on the street feels about a movie, the fact that both franchises make a ton of money is enough to insure their continued presence on bookstore shelves, in theaters and in the hearts of fans everywhere.

Check it out after the jump.

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One of the great things about the Internets is you often find lots of creative people with time on their hands. Some of them even have talent. In those cases, we are often lucky enough to get some great videos put together and then shared with the online world at large. This is one of those cases.

In this very clever video by RebelliousPixels, Edward Cullen from the Twilight Series meets Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer at Sunnydale High. According to the folks that made this video: “It’s an example of transformative storytelling serving as a visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behavior. Seen through Buffy’s eyes some of the more patriarchal gender roles and sexist Hollywood tropes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed in hilarious ways.”

Sounds good to me. Let’s get to it. Check out the video after the jump.

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Last week on The Flickcast, the team discussed and debated a slew of new topics including Apple announcements from the World Wide Developer Conference, the recent E3 gaming convention, The Hangover, Kirsten Dunst joining Spider-Man 4, movies in 3D and a whole lot more.

This week, Chris and Matt have to go on without Christina but are joined by special guest Rick Marshall of MTV’s Splashpage and Movie’s Blog to talk comics, movies and all things geek. Some of the topics discussed this time around include John Carter of Mars casting, the rebirth of Captain America, why Tim Burton should return to the Batman franchise.

They also talked about Rick’s favorite comic book-to-film adaptations (including Iron Man and Man-Thing), the disappointment of Spider-Man 3, the power of Twitter in movie marketing and upcoming comic-book-to-film adaptations including Whiteout, Scott Pilgrim and Iron Man 2.

Chris, Matt and Rick also made some picks this week including one of Rick’s favorite comics, Sleeper, Matt’s pick of one of his favorite movies called Fortress, featuring Christopher Lambert and Loryn Locklin, and Chris’ pick of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York.

As always, if you have comments, questions, critiques or offers of sponsorship, feel free to hit us up in the comments, on Twitter and at Facebook, MySpace or via email.