'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' Opens With $58.4 Million
Will it be able to sustain its dominance and to what height?
Laremy's early Wednesday/Thursday predictions had Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince opening to the tune of $60.1 million with expectation the film would earn $34.7 million on Thursday. It appears he wasn't too far off.
After earning a record-breaking $22.2 million in midnight shows the film has rolled to a $58.4 million opening day from 4,275 theaters, well ahead of the $44 million earned by Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix reports Variety's Pamela McClintock.
McClintock goes on to say predictions for the five-day weekend range from $125-150 million, which will have it still falling short of the $198.2 million Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen earned earlier this year, second only to The Dark Knight's $203.8 million. However, this is based purely on previous installments and seeing how this is Harry Potter's first PG-rated film since Prisoner of Azkaban back in 2004 and a film that still carries an 88% rating at RottenTomatoes we may be able to expect much more.
Of course, as Steven Zeitchik points out based on Potter's past, "Over its five previous installments, the series has shown a remarkable immunity to reviews. In fact, not only do strong reviews not matter — they're correlated to fewer dollars." The two highest grossing Harry Potter films are the first two, the two that have the lowest RottenTomatoes scores at 78% and 77% with the others ranging from the mid-to-high-80s.
Who knows how it will all turn out, but I can tell you Laremy will take a stab at it. Stay tuned, later today he will have his three-day box-office predictions… Play along and see if you can beat him. Looking back at our Wednesday/Thursday estimate article I see "athar" came closest with a $58.5m prediction while "NackAttack" and "Topy" came a close second with $58m predictions. Good on yah folks.
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