A blog from the Alt Film Guide about Eclipse being in Second Place after 10 days.

First, the bad news for The Twilight Saga, Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Stephenie Meyer, David Slade, vampire, werewolf, and Forks fans (but good news for Twihaters): after only ten days out, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is no longer the top movie at the North American box office.

The Universal-distributed animated 3D fantasy-adventure Despicable Me, directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, and featuring the voices of Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Julie Andrews, Miranda Cosgrove, Will Arnett, Kristen Wig, Russell Brand, and others, took the pole position at the box office on Friday, earning an estimated $22m (between $55m-$60m for the weekend) according to Nikki Finke‘s Deadline.com. (Note: the figures found in Finke’s piece are very early, very rough estimates.)

Now, the good news for Twihards (bad news for Twihaters): Eclipse should gross about $35m over the weekend ($11.5m on Friday) — or about 52% of what it earned a week ago.

If figures turn out to be accurate (Summit was way off last weekend), that would be a much better holdover rate than New Moon‘s. The previous installment of the Twilight Saga dropped a whopping 70% on its second weekend.

Thus, Eclipse should be crossing the $250m milestone at the domestic box office by the middle of next week. And it’ll likely stay around for quite a while.

At no. 3, the Robert Rodriguez-produced, Nimród Antal-directed Predators, made for about $38m, took in an estimated $11m on Friday for a weekend total of about $30m.

That’s good news for Twentieth Century Fox and for star Adrien Brody, who hasn’t had much luck at the box office despite his Oscar for The Pianist back in early ’03. Just a few weeks ago, Brody’s Splice rapidly sank to the bottom of the box-office depths.

Toy Story 3 should be the weekend’s no. 4 movie, with $7.3m on Friday and approximately $21m by Sunday night.

M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Last Airbender was down to the no. 5 spot, with $5.3m on Friday and about $17m for the weekend. Some time within the next couple of days, the action-adventure will cross the $100m mark.

Source