Reject Report: $140 Million for Harry Potter

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on July 15, 2007

Well, as predicted everywhere Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix blew out the competition at theaters in the USA and around the world. In the USA alone, Harry has made an estimated five-day total of $140,017,000. The three-day weekend tally is estimated at $77,410,000. Those aren’t records, but it is still a huge chunk of change for the Harry Potter franchise and good news for folks over at Warner Brothers.

Around the world Harry Potter continues to do huge business, with Warner Brothers estimating that the release has done $190.3 mil outside the USA. With the final Harry Potter novel set for release in days, business should continue to be good for this movie for weeks to come.

So that’s just one of the big box office stories of this weekend. The other major story is the total freaking meltdown of the horror genre, with the flop performance of Elisha Cuthbert’s movie Captivity. Boy, do I ever look like a fool for predicting this film would do $7 million in business. It only did $1,550,000, for twelfth place! Not even a top ten finish!!

Honestly, though, this movie should have done much better. Sure, the reviews were resoundingly terrible (6% on Rotten Tomatoes), but this movie was shown in 1050 theaters! It also had plenty of TV advertising behind it. It was even released on a Friday the 13th! It should have done reasonable business as counter-programming to Harry Potter, but everyone stayed away. $1.5 million is a brutal box-office performance for this picture. That’s a lot of empty cinemas across America for this movie, folks.

There are a lot of stories on these movie blogs about how badly Captivity did. These horror movies have really underperformed, with Grindhouse flopping and Hostel: Part II doing very poorly as well. The one recent horror release that has done reasonably well in recent weeks has been 1408. That’s it! People are now engaging in grim speculation about the future of the horror movie in the USA. This genre is definitely in a slump at the box office. Clearly, it looks as if people are fed up with gory horror movies, especially these ones that show lots of torture scenes.

Maybe it’s just a case of too many horror movies for this time of year; certainly there have been a lot of them lately. Why not wait for the fall or winter to release a horror flick? You would expect people might want to get frightened at that time of year, especially around Halloween. Summer is supposed to be the fun time at the movies— the time where you go to see action, special effects, funny computer-generated animals, and gorgeous actresses who wear bikinis (Jessica Biel)! Not any of this torture violence! Who wants to take your girlfriend to a movie like that this summer?

Maybe people out there in middle America really are fed up with horror movies. It could be, though, that this was just desserts for a bad movie released at the wrong time of year. Captivity is a flop in every sense of the word.

Anyway, here’s the full rundown of the weekend grosses (from Box Office Mojo):

By the way, the overall USA tally is now just under $223 mil for Transformers after two weeks.

That’s it for now, Stay tuned for The Reject Report on Friday for our preview of the weekend’s movies.

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