Breaking Dawn Has Third-Biggest Opening Day Ever With $72 Million Box Office

As you might have guessed from our midnight box office report, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 is completely tearing up the box office this weekend and is only getting strong. Early results are in from Friday, and according to Deadline the movie earned $72 million on Friday, good enough to become the third-biggest domestic opening day of all time, behind only Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and another Twilight movie, New Moon.

That Friday take puts Breaking Dawn on pace for an opening weekend in the range of $140 million, probably just behind New Moon's massive total. The movie has already grossed $138 million worldwide, so by the time this weekend is over, the penultimate Twilight movie will be well on its way toward making back its budget. None of this is a surprise, of course, and the executives at Summit are probably already salivating about the potential of making Breaking Dawn Part 2 even more successful when it opens in theaters this time next year.

The odd thing about all of this is that Breaking Dawn received a predictably high CinemaScore rating of B+ from fans, but has gotten some of the worst reviews in the franchise's history, with a 27% Rotten Tomatoes score that puts it below even New Moon. You can come up with your own reasons that the worst-reviewed movies in the Twilight franchise are also the most financially successful, but I'm still a little baffled by the bad reviews for Breaking Dawn-- sure, it's not a good movie, but maybe even more fun to sit through than the previous ones. Maybe Twilight mania has gotten so intense that even critics are ready to strike back.