I think that Halo 3 should be able to pull in more money on first-day, than Spider-man 3 in it's first weekend. In order to do that, it'd need somewhere around 2.3-2.5 mill.

Last night there was about 100 people at the local FutureShop. My guess is that at most half of the people had preordered but i bet it was less. Assuming that the majority of those 1.5 mill pre-orders get filled we can assume that at least 500,000 people bought it without pre-orders, i wouldn't be surprised if it was a mill though.

If Gears of War still has legs then Halo 3 will definitely have legs!

 We Americans love Halo!!!!!!

Also I expect Halo 3 to do better than Gears of War in Japan. 

Apparently it is at 1.8 million sold already:
http://www.n4g.com/industrynews/News-70182.aspx

My guess is this is U.S. only since it talks about 1.5 million pre-orders which was the number I kept hearing for U.S.

IGN - AU review - 8.9

anyways

1.5 million preorders.. CNN just said 1.3 million...

Microsoft reported 1.5 million preorders and they should know since they're the ones collecting the actual preorder information. Where did CNN get their number from? Obviously it would have had to be from Microsoft, so someone messed up the number somewhere there (at CNN).

More initial sales estimates: http://www.counterspinblog.com/?p=16

It's sitting at 1.8 million copies in the first 8 hours, and it's estimated to end up at 2.45 million on the first day. If that happens, it beats Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for biggest entertainment first day ever. If these numbers pan out, Microsoft has to be tossing the confetti.

 man if it beats 3 milion in less than 36 hours they gonna be going to amsterdam get some hookers stone and go back to work next week at MS lol.... imagine that would mean that 1% of the US population has halo 3 in the first 36 hours.... and about 3%+ of the households that's insane... considering that harry potter wasn't rated M