It was has to be a sure sign of the apocalypse, The Twilight Saga: New Moon had the third biggest opening weekend in movie history.

New Moon took in $26.3 million at its 12:01 AM showings on Friday leading to a grand total for the day of $72.7 million.  The final domestic tally for the second film in the Twilight series was $140.7 million, placing it as the third biggest opening weekend ever, behind only The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3.

The film followed last year’s Twilight box office trends exactly except that it doubled each day’s take, something that is unheard of for a sequel.  On top of what it pulled in domestically, it also set records around the world, bringing in another $118.1 million for a total worldwide of $258.8 million.  While the studio hasn’t chosen to release any information on what the budget was for the second film, it’s probably safe to say that New Moon is in the black on the balance sheets.

So, what does this teach us?  Teenage girls have way too much money.  According to Box Office Mojo, 80 percent of the audience for this weekend domestically was female, and 50 percent of those women were under the age of 21.  This is similar to what led to Titanic being the highest grossing film of all time, that audience was almost totally driven by teenage girls, and while I doubt New Moon will approach those numbers, it’s still scary.

Why does this make movie fans weep?  Well, why should anyone even try to come up with something original any more when you can just make a film adaptation of a book of questionable literary value?  Kudos to Stephenie Meyer for creating such a successful series, but no one is ever going to confuse these books with classics.  In the meantime, Hollywood is trying to snatch up every book series it can find to turn in to films thanks to Harry Potter and Twilight.  It just makes my head hurt.

Just remember, Eclipse, the third film in the series is due for release on June 30, 2010, until then I leave you with this handy guide to Twilight …