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It's being mentioned in a few of the box office reports showing up online, but we here at Cinematical felt it deserved its own post. In case you haven't noticed, Twilight's $70.5 million amounts to the best opening weekend for a female director ever. Not only did she break Mimi Leder's (Deep Impact) record of $41.1 million, but Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke destroyed it -- bringing her all the way up to the 29th best opening weekend in history (according to Box Office Mojo), slightly beating -- wait for it -- Michael Bay's Transformers by roughly $50 thousand on 600 less screens. I think this proved giant f**king robots are no match for millions of screaming girls.

But this isn't the only record Catherine Hardwicke could break. Our friends over at Over Thinking It pointed out that should Twilight gross more than $187 million domestic, the film will crack the top 100 grossing movies of all time (domestic) list. And if that happens, Hardwicke will become the first female live action American director to crack the holy top 100. I'm sure there's a bunch of other weird little records in there, but I failed math back in the day and I'm probably not the guy you want adding things up.

While this is a great achievement for Hardwicke and women filmmakers, however, there's this quote from a recent study conducted by Dr. Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University (via OTI): "Women accounted for 6% of directors in 2007, a decline of one percentage point since 2006. This figure is almost half the percentage of women directors working in 2000 when women accounted for 11% of all directors." Not good. Hopefully Hardwicke's fantastic opening will help open some eyes ...

Check out our interview with Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke over here.

The Promise, Chen Kaige's gorgeous fantasy epic (remember the trailer?) and also China's official Oscar entry, easily broke the Chinese opening weekend records when it was released last week. The film's four-day total of £5.2 million outdistanced the previous record (set by Kung-Fu Hustle) by almost a full £1 million, and the first week total is also expected to set a record.

The film, which took nearly three years to shoot is, with its cost of £24 million, the most expensive Chinese film ever made. It is one of the nominees for the best foreign film Golden Globe Award, and must be considered one of the films with a legitimate shot at an Oscar nom as well, if only because of the status of its director. Unfortunately, the US release is currently slated for some vague time next spring (by which point a region 0 DVD will be widely available), so we won't know for month and months if it actually deserves any of this regard.