With this weekend, we bid adieu to the Twilight franchise, likely to be forgotten to the annals of history in a few short years. For its time, it was a monstrously popular franchise, raking in piles of cash. And as this weekend proved, it’s not quite done, and I can only hope that Summit Entertainment doesn’t try to milk the franchise even more with something ridiculous like a Short Second Life of Bree Tanner movie.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II

If only it actually ended this way.

Fans of Twilight are numerous and passionate. However, they’ve remained largely stagnant ever since New Moon three years ago. The franchise stopped growing and, unlike the Harry Potter franchise, it hardly seemed like anyone aside already established fans were going to bother turning out for this. In the film-makers’ defense, the “twist” ending of this one was actually pretty cool and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Definitely the best part in the whole franchise. That’s beside the point, though, as Breaking Dawn Part II opened to a huge $141.3 million.

I hesitate to call such a huge opening “disappointing,” but it’s just odd that this last entry barely improved on Breaking Dawn Part I and actually opened a bit shy of New Moon. Nonetheless, this will still be highly profitable, especially factoring in overseas grosses. However, given how incredibly frontloaded these pictures tend to be, I doubt BD2 will reach $300 million, so the highest grossing entry in the franchise will belong to Eclipse, which is fitting since it was probably the best of all of them.

Skyfall fell 53%, a bit more than I expected, to finish in second with $41.5 million. Nonetheless, this is great news. Despite opening significantly higher, Skyfall still held better than Quantum of Solace. And it made more in its second weekend than Casino Royale did in its first. Also, it’s only about $7 million from being the highest grossing entry in the long running franchise with a current total of $161.3 million.

Expanding into nationwide release, Lincoln manages to impressively finish in third place. It managed a very strong $21 million in just 1775 theatres (it would’ve been cool if they expanded to 1865 theatres) for a venue average $11,831, which was very similar to the average of Skyfall. This a great result for this film, as it will likely continue to expand and has the standard Thanksgiving boost to look forward to. $100 million is certainly a possibility.

Wreck-It Ralph dropped 45% $18.3 million. Its total of $121.5 so far is good, though not spectacular. However, family films do very well over Thanksgiving, so it’s possibly Ralph and company might actually make more next weekend. Dropping 42%, Flight fell to fifth place and pulled in $8.6 million. With $61.3 million in the bank, this might end up in the same range as the $81 million of Unstoppable.

Continuing to inch toward $100 million, Argo dropped 39% to $4.1 million. It’s up to $92. million now and should end up somewhere $105-110 million. Taken 2 fell 48% to $2.1 million. With $135 million, it’ll probably fall just shy of the original Taken, but for how awful a movie this was, that’s pretty impressive. Pitch Perfect, down 51%, pulled in $1.3 million and raised its total to $62 million.

In ninth, Here Comes the Boom dropped 52% to $1.2 million. A total of $41 million isn’t bad. We round out the top ten with the colossal failure, Cloud Atlas, which plummeted 66% to $900,000, although I should mention that Hotel Transylvania and The Sessions (I have never heard of this movie) were also estimated at $900,000, so we’ll see what actually took the number ten spot on Monday.

Thanksgiving weekend, fittingly, is often a plentiful bounty of box office activity. Holdovers, especially family-oriented ones, hold very well, although it’s often not the best for big openers. Nonetheless, we’ve got three new films coming down the pipeline.

Red Dawn: I don’t care much for overly jingoistic films like this, but I will literally see anything with Chris Hemsworth in it. Also, Isabel Lucas is gorgeous. That said, I really don’t expect much from this, as the whole thing looks kind of, well, silly. Give it $12 million.

Life of Pi: This one is hard to pick. So, you know what, I’m just going to completely pull a number out of my ass and go with with $14 million.

Rise of the Guardians: It’s hard to tell whether or not this actually qualifies as a straight Christmas movie. Santa is involved, but there’s so much else going on. Anyway, I think it’s quite possible that families will turn out in droves, especially since they haven’t had a go-to movie open over the last two weeks. Let’s go with $45 million. Next weekend should actually be pretty interesting, and has the potential to be pretty huge. Always an exciting time for a box office analyst. Until we meet again, friends.