'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.

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.

In the U.S. and Canada, "Dark of the Moon" got an A grade from movie word-of-mouth researcher Cinemascore, which helped the film overcome the bad narrative aftertaste of 2009's "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen."

About 62 percent of the audience was male, and 55 percent was under the age of 25, making "Transformers 3" one of the few movies this year to truly resonate with young-male moviegoers.