'Transformers 3' Scores $400M+ Opening at Global Box Office

Marking the second hugely successful day-and-date global release this summer, Paramount's " Transformers: Dark of the Moon " grossed $379 million at the worldwide box office through Sunday, according to studio estimates. The total will easily exceed $400 million by the of Monday.

Paramount estimates that the sequel will meet its pre-release domestic projections with $181.1 million by the end of day Monday.

"Dark of the Moon" also set a four-day Fourth of July holiday-weekend record with $116.4 million over the frame -- narrowly beating Sony's " Spider-Man 2 " ($115.8 million), pending final tally.

But it was the foreign market, 70 percent of which chose to see the movie in 3D, that drove "Transformers 3."

Opening up in 58 territories across the globe at the same time it premiered in 4,013 theaters in the U.S. and Canada, the film enjoyed the third biggest foreign Wednesday-through-Sunday opening ever.

Also read: One Billion Dollars! Disney's 'Pirates 4' is the 8the Film to Cross Big Box-Office Mark 

Earlier, IMAX announced that "Transformers 3" had set a global-opening record, grossing an estimated $22.5 million on worldwide IMAX screens through Sunday.

The huge overseas start comes just over a month after Disney's day-and-date global release of " Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides " yielded a $256.3 million opening abroad. That film went on to cross the $1 billion mark this weekend, largely on the back of the foreign market.

"If we hadn't chosen to debut the movie later in Japan and China, we probably would have had the all-time record," noted Don Harris, general manager of distribution for Paramount.

Here's how the top 10 finished. Full report continues below chart:

Releasing a film around the world the same weekend it premieres in the U.S. and Canada -- what the industry calls a day and date premiere -- started as a means of combating piracy. The logic: why wait for illicit copies of a film to spoil emerging markets like Russia? Just get the film out there.

But with "Pirates 4" and "Transformers 3" showing the strategy has a potentially explosive upside, might we see more of these types of worldwide releases?

Could be.

"Just from a publicity standpoint, it's easier to get [the cast] together at one time and take them on the road," said Harris, noting that the "Transformers" crew got all its press junkets out of the way in a worldwide barnstorming tour that started in Russia, wound through Germany and ended in New York.

Transformers 3(D) Wrecks Serious Face At Hong Kong Box Office ...

The Summer bot-buster opened on Wednesday at theaters in Hong Kong and took in $6m HK (That’s about 770 grand here in the U.S.), beating out (ok, obliterating) the previous champ, Toy Story 3 which topped out at $5m HK to become the #1 non-holiday release EVAR!

Transformers 3 then went on to gross $40m HK during it’s first 5 days (That’s just a bit over $5m U.S. bucks, for those keeping track) to set the record for a film’s opening weekend.

To date, the highest grossing release in Hong Kong is Spider Man 3 (Man…those guys LOVE their part threes, don’t they?) which grossed $7.2m HK (just a squirt of hamster piss short of a million bucks, here in the land of the big P.X.) with it’s May 1, 2007 release…A public holiday in HK.

Hopes are high that Transformers 3 will break the $100m mark and become the first film NOT made by James Cameron to do so.

To set the record straight, though…tickets for 3d movies are about 75% more expensive than tickets for standard movies, in Hong Kong so…take it for what it’s worth.

And in more domestic news, the latest installment of the robot toy franchise scored an impressive $37.3m first day gross here in ‘murica, giving it the largest opening day gross of 2011.

All this being said, we here at FEZ have seen this and not a single one of us was impressed.  From recycled footage to an extreme over-reliance on CGI the film just fell flat for us.  Once, I saw of video of a grasshopper eating an aloe sprig…I was way more impressed.

SO, there you have it.

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