Cinematical

I'm sure you've heard the news by now: The biggest opening of all time now belongs to Spider-Man 3, and by "opening" I also mean A) first day, B) first weekend, and C) a ton of international opening days / weekends. Oh, and D) number of North America theaters. The thing's a mammoth smash, basically, and it was only released three freakin' days ago! Here's a breakdown of the stats, courtesy of the number-crunching geniuses over at BoxOfficeMojo.com:

Biggest opening Friday: $59.8 million from 4,252 theaters, which is also a record
Biggest Saturday: $51.3 million
Biggest Sunday: $39.9 million
Biggest IMAX weekend: $4.8 million from 84 theaters
Biggest total weekend: $151.1 million, which is about $10 million higher than the weekend estimates predicted!

The movie also broke a record for biggest gap between first and second place, a record I didn't even know people kept track of. (This past weekend's #2 movie was Disturbia, which pulled in about $5.9 million.) The previous record holder for biggest opening day ($55.1 million) and biggest opening weekend ($135 million) was last summer's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest -- which means that Jack Sparrow will have a shot at reclaiming the prize in only a few weeks. The third chapter, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, opens on May 25.

And for some opening weekend comparisons: The original Spider-Man, which opened on May 3, 2002, snatched just over $114 million from 3,876 theaters in its opening weekend, whereas Spider-Man 2 (which opened on June 30, 2004) pulled in $88.1 million from 4,166 theaters. Final domestic tallies for those flicks were $403 million and $373 million, respectively. Worldwide? Spider-Man made about $821 million while the sequel did about $783 million. Looks like the best flick in the series was also the least profitable. Weird.