That was nearly three years ago. Now, Spider-Man 3 (yes, that one) stands at the top of the heap with an impressive $151 million dollar take. Like that giant ten-pointer mounted above your grandfather's mantle, everyone (including Microsoft) knows bigger is better, so they're gunning for Spidey's top spot and hoping to re-crown Master Chief as the king of the most lucrative entertainment properties ... in a 24-hour period. But Microsoft isn't gunning for Spidey alone. It's got friends like Comcast, Burger King, 7-Eleven, Mountain Dew and Pontiac riding shotgun, throwing their hefty promotional weight behind the cause.
If this all sounds hopelessly trivial, try to recall that swell of pride when you told that 8th-grader his beloved boy wizard was powerless against the cybernetically-augmented Master Chief. Microsoft's Chris Di Cesare spells it out for us, saying before that, "When we went to talk to promotional partners, [we'd] spend half the meeting talking about the videogame business. When we opened to $125 million, that really caught a lot of people's attention. It showed that videogames were no longer that thing that kids play in their basement." So, with another record opening this September – no doubt aided by a $60 (or $130) price tag – we can again resume our schoolyard taunts of video game supremacy. So there.
