I just heard a dog bark at me. I talked to the dog, and it told me that it was just feeling insecure and lonely. Then we got a sandwich.

THE GOOD SIDE OF NEW MOON

Summit entertainment looked to be the new Artisan, which (for those who don’t remember) got absorbed into Lionsgate. Lionsgate and Summit are two of the actual mini-majors going these days. They aren’t an adjunct, like Warner Premiere or Fox Searchlight, there to handle smaller releases. Summit has also released two of the best films of the year: The Hurt Locker and The Brothers Bloom.

New Moon is like Harry Potter, so the effect is minimal on cinema. Cirque Du Freak, and the like have been coming and will be coming. Studios are wary, but they’ll probably keep trying to mine young adult literature. But what they mostly want are phenomenons, and they come when they come. The film should make somewhere around $200 million, even if it opens to $100 million. People thought the series would die upon release, but that’s not the case. As such, the franchise will survive for a while, and the next film is already going. Summit is smart: Keep it going.

Summit hasn’t found its feet yet, all things, and they may not have known what they had with Twilight until it blew up like nobodies business. That said, they haven’t known how to market much else. But until Summit starts making exclusively shitty horror films, they seem to be taking chances, and with their Twilight capital, that has led to interesting films. Some will bemoan the success of these terrible films (from all accounts, I’m staying virginal with this phenom), and this has a certain appeal to its core audience, so the politics of films and books that play into female fantasies about stalking and abuse… Rogers and Hammerstein wrote Carousel, so this is nothing new, even if a film series that suggested women really wanted it would be a huge panic button (even if that’s a genre to itself).

Still, when people bemoan the gross, Summit seems to be one of the good ones. If this isn’t for you, then it isn’t.

IT’S THE N-O-T-O, R-I, O, U-S, YOU JUST PREDICT DOWN SLOW

So New Moon happens. Maybe 2012 doesn’t collapse or prolapse. I’m going lower on New Moon than most, partly because I feel like it has a big opening day and then collapses a little. There is a fanbase, and it’s huge, and people are going to go crazy for it, but even with the huge opening, the highest this gets is $230 Million, with the first film doing $190.

1. New Moon – $94.7 Million
2. 2012 – $27.5 Million
3. Planet 51 – $17 Million
4. A Christmas Carol – $14.9 Million
5. The Blind Side – $13 Million

And Precious is right out of the top five. This is a huge weekend, but New Moon is one of those things that has little to do with the rest of the box office. Sunday I’ll be here.