Vampire Movie, “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” Grosses $161.2 Million

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jul 7, 6:25PM EDT · Published Jul 5, 7:20AM EDT

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“The Twilight Sage: Eclipse” has grossed $161.2 million since Wednesday, a breathtaking amount, even for a vampire movie. “That’s one of the biggest five-day debuts in Hollywood history, previously surpassed by just a handful of films including “The Dark Knight” and last summer’s sequel to “Transformers”, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Vampires and werewolves, it seems, are nearly everywhere on TV and in movie theaters. The CW network offers “The Vampire Diaries” and HBO has a hit program called “True Blood”.

Dracula, now over a century old, may be having his best year. He was created in 1897 by author Bram StokerThe current breed of vampires have gone beyond Dracula’s simple “bit and bleed” habit. The newer vampires have love lives, fight werewolves, and have their own home pages on Facebook. Some even use Twitter. They are so active, it is a wonder that they are “undead” at all.

The vampire fetish is almost impossible to understand, at least among mature adults. The fans for the creatures are mostly teenagers drawn to a world where they can live forever, even if they have to spend the sunny part of the day at rest in coffins. The next evolution of the vampire story is likely to be that the coffins are dispensed with and bleeding humans will become a 24-hour-a-day affair.

The balance of the big box office winners where “The Airbender” in second place with a $52.3 million take, followed by “Toy Story 3”, “Grown-Ups”, Knight and Day”, “Karate Kid”, and “The A-Team”.

It seems that films about regular people do not stand a chance.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.