The Matrix Reloaded earned an estimated four-day total of $135.8 million, sending it past Spider-Man's $125.9 million for the all-time best four-day cumulative box office receipts.  The film earned some $93.3 million over the weekend with the second biggest weekend gross ever, trailing only Spider-Man's $114.8 million.  Earlier The Matrix Reloaded set a single day record with $42.5 million on Thursday, though this particular record will require an asterisk because the Matrix opened in some 3,000 theaters on Wednesday night at 10 pm. The Matrix Reloaded audience was primarily male (62%) and evenly split between those under and over 25.  Given this split and the film's 'R' rating it's obvious that The Matix Reloaded hit the jackpot with the 18-25 year-old male audience.  In spite of mixed reviews from professional critics, audience polls for The Matrix Reloaded were overwhelmingly positive with some 87% checking 'excellent' or 'very good' according to Warner Bros. VP Jeff Goldstein.

 

The Matrix Reloaded's huge opening obviously hurt X2, which dropped 57% to an estimated $17.1 million and slipped into third place trailing the comedy Daddy Day Care, which took in an estimated $19.2 million.  X2 now has a cumulative box office total of some $174 million, well past the original X-Men film's total of $157 million.  Depending on how X2 manages to bounce back from the impact of The Matrix Reloaded's mega opening, the film should end up with a domestic gross somewhere between $210 and $250 million -- a definite indication that the audience for the X-Men has grown considerably in the interval between the release of the two films.