THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN will begin spinning its midnight webs in just a few hours, so let’s take a quick look at its competition in the midnight screening record books.
The Sam Raimi 2002-07 Spider-Man trilogy were successful at midnight, but with $8-10M grosses that have long since been passed.
All of the current top 6 midnight grossers have been part of the Harry Potter or Twilight series, with Deathly Hallows Part 2 the leader by far at $43.5M. Next are Twilights Breaking Dawn Part 1, Eclipse and New Moon at $26.3-$30.3M, followed by Deathly Hallows Part 1 and Half-Blood Prince at $24M and $22.2M, respectively.
2 of this year’s openings are in the 7 and 8 slots: The Hunger Games with $19.7M and The Avengers with$18.7M. The list is rounded out by The Dark Knight ($18.5M) and Revenge of the Sith ($16.5M).
Considering that on that list, only Hunger Games isn’t a sequel within an existing franchise, Amazing Spider-Man may not hit the Top 10. Not all big movies in the fantasy-action genre generate major midnight business: Men in Black 3 had only a $1.6M opening midnight. But Sony has been plugging the midnight performances for Spider-Man fairly hard, so a reasonable goal would be in the $10M area, leading in to a 6-day holiday period that could be a bonanza for the studio.
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