Box Office: Harry Potter Waves His Wand, Fills His Coin Purse

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on July 20, 2009

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Well, the Harry Potter devotees waited a long time for this latest adventure, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, to show up. And when I say they couldn’t wait, I mean they REALLY couldn’t wait. Their midnight box office topped $22.2 million in North America. Their Wednesday box office take was $58 million domestic and when you count the international markets it topped the $100 million gross on just its opening day. It is the best opening for a Harry Potter movie of all time.

You would think that kind of a start this Harry Potter movie would be on track to shatter more records this weekend. I guess the story might be that this Harry Potter movie didn’t do even better. THe fact that it wasn’t playing in IMAX probably hurt it a lot. It doesn’t expand in IMAX for two weeks, so Harry Potter couldn’t benefit from their fat, inflated ticket prices. As a result ended the five-day period with a haul of $159.6 million domestic and a weekend total of $79 million. That’s way less than what Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and The Dark Knight did over the same stretch of time. And quite frankly, I think it means Harry Potter’s dreams of winning the summer box office title may have gone up in smoke, because it came up $40 million short of the Transformers 2 haul earlier this year. That’s a lot of ground to make up.

The other big story from the weekend is the continued meltdown of Bruno at the box office. It fell a massive 72.7 percent from its showing last weekend, down to fourth place and only $8,374,000.

The “overwhelming” bad word-of-mouth continues to receive the blame for the movie’s swift decline, and I have no reason to think otherwise. Just this week, those opinionated ladies on “The View” took their opportunity to trash the movie, with Barbara Walters voicing her revulsion over the graphic close-ups on screen. In fact, she went so far as to say this movie might even turn people homophobic: strong language from her, especially since the movie was supposed to ridicule homophobia.

People are openly criticizing the MPAA for not rating this movie NC-17. Well, I’ll tell you, if Bruno had been rated NC-17 it wouldn’t have made it to a $49 million overall domestic gross, because the NC-17 rating is absolutely the box office kiss of death. I think the most money an NC-17 movie ever made is $20 million, tops. So really, the MPAA cut Bruno a big break.

Anyway, the bottom line is that Bruno is going down the tubes fast and the public is thumbing its noses. And that is all I will say about that.

The weekend box office results are as follows: