The second installment of the “Twilight Saga,” New Moon, had an extremely successful opening last weekend, grossing $142,839,137 domestically, which is the the third highest weekend opening of all time. Unfortunately, the following weekend the movie made substantially less substantially less, only $42,870,031, a drop of over 70% which is much greater than what most movies experience. On average, for the top 100 grossing movies of 2008, titles dropped 50% on the second weekend. Out of the top 100 openings of all time, only New Moon has dropped over 70%. So how or why did New Moon lose its shine?

One factor is surely reviews. Looking at the top 100 second weekend drops it is clear that many of the movies were simply bad. Scathing reviews from critics and bad word of mouth from opening weekend customers can obviously deter people from seeing a movie. An approximation for this relationship can be seen by graphing a movie’s box office (BO) drop to its Rotten Tomatoes (RT) score, a well known index that  averages critics’ reviews into a simple average. Titles that mark above 60% are deemed ‘fresh’ while those below are ‘rotten.’ Taking the titles that had BO drops of over over 70%, in terms of average gross per theater, and plotting them against their RT scores yielded the following graph.

The two biggest drops  of 83% and 82% were  Gigli and Captivity, who both scored less than 10% on the Tomatometer. New Moon was in the upper left-hand quadrant of the group, with a 30% RT Score and a 70% box office drop. While most of the movies that dropped more than 70% were ‘rotten’ there was still a low correlation in this group between RT scores and BO drops. Certain movies with good reviews, like Hellboy II, Jackass Number Two and Borat, still dropped a lot during their second weekend. At the same time most “rotten” titles don’t drop over 70% or even 60% after opening weekend so it’s clear that there must be something else to explain the demise of New Moon.

The other factors that explain BO drops are not quantifiable and are related to its target audience. Earlier this year I studied the top 100 movies of 2008 in terms box office gross and I noted that certain titles were ‘sprinters’, quickly losing box office steam after the first weekend, while others were ‘marathoners’, keeping a steady earnings pace for much longer stretches. I also noticed that most of the ‘sprinters’ like Cloverfield, Saw V and Meet the Spartans were targeted towards teens or young adults. It makes sense that heavily hyped movies draws immense traffic from teens on opening weekend. Other titles, especially horror or science fiction franchises, while not exclusively aimed at teens, still fit the ‘sprinter’ modus operandi, since they attract extreme loyal niche audiences who have to see the movie during its opening weekend.

New Moon is clearly a ‘sprinter’ since it’s in the horror/fantasy genre, it’s aimed mostly at teens and young adults, and it has a loyal fanbase. Given these circumstances it should not be surprising that it dropped so much during its second weekend, even if there were no major openings this past Thanksgiving weekend- an oversight perhaps of other studios who overestimated the potential competition from Twilight’s second coming.