The Weekend’s Winners: There was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 — with its $125 million haul — and then there was everything else.
The Weekend’s Losers: To say that The Next Three Days flopped is to bury the lead here: Russell Crowe has flopped; nay, movie stars may have flopped, people: The next film after Harry was DreamWorks Animation’s Megamind, with a little better than $16 million after a little less than three weeks; following it, Unstoppable, with $13.1 million in its second week. Due Date, in its third week, pulled in $9.1 million. Finally, we can get to Crowe’s The Next Three Days, with just shy of $7 million — in its first weekend.
How It All Went Down: It’s no longer interesting to talk about how Warner Bros. opens a Harry Potter movie. The answer is self-evident, thanks to its outdoor campaign: “Nowhere is safe.” Quite literally, one could not turn on a television, a radio, a computer, open a magazine, or look out a car window without seeing Harry. The studio is understood to have spent roughly $150 million just on marketing the movie.
Really, the question of who goes is not as interesting as the question of who doesn’t.
By Thursday, online ticketing service Fandango.com reported that Harry was accounting for 97 percent of all movie-ticket sales. Unconcerned by its long 145-minute running time, theater owners scrambled to add 3:15 a.m. showtimes when their midnight shows sold out, after hearing news that more than half of moviegoers surveyed by Fandango said they wouldn’t mind if it were actually longer.
In the end, fully 25 percent of the Harry audience was between the ages of 18-34, though, interestingly, it skews slightly more female (57 percent) than male.
Your Top Ten:
1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, $125.1 million
2. Megamind, $16.2 million
3. Unstoppable, $13.1 million
4. Due Date, $9.15 million
5. The Next Three Days, $6.75 million
6. Morning Glory, $5.2 million
7. Skyline, $3.4 million
8. Red, $2.5 million
9. For Colored Girls, $2.4 million
10. Fair Game, $1.5 million
