hollywoodnews.com: I don’t generally like to brag, but my math yesterday concerning a likely poor weekend multiplier for the seventh Harry Potter film was dead-on. After opening with $24 million in midnight showings, the film pulled in $61 million on its first day, and just $38 million on its second, which was a 39% drop. In other words, it pulled in on Saturday almost EXACTLY what it pulled in on Friday without those midnight screenings. Said Friday-to-Saturday drop will put it squarely in the top-ten for the biggest such plunges. The actual weekend estimate is $125.1 million, which gives the series both its biggest three-day opening weekend and its lowest weekend-multiplier ever (2.04x). It also makes ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I’ the most front-loaded midnight movie ever for its opening weekend, as it did 19% of its weekend business on 12:01am showings (go here for a rundown of notable midnight numbers). The good news is that ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I’ scored the sixth-biggest opening weekend of all time. The bad news is that it also scored the sixth most front-loaded opening weekends in history as well. Is that a box office equivalent of a palindrome? What this all means is that, as suspected for awhile, the ‘Harry Potter’ franchise is playing pretty much identical to the much-compared ‘Twilight Saga.’ Both franchises had had massively front-loaded sequels. Both franchises play almost exclusively to the fans, with few converts jumping on-board this late in the game. The last three ‘Harry Potter’ films had grossed $290 million, $292 million, and $301 million respectively. As you can see, when you add in inflation and a random variable or two, the films have basically the same attendance level. There is no reason to expect anything different from this seventh chapter, so factoring in inflation and the added IMAX ticket-price bump, we can expect this penultimate ‘Harry Potter’ adventure to gross around $310-320 million (the series high is still the original, ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,’ with $317 million). Regardless, you can bet that the eight and final film, which opens on July 15th, will get a big box office boost from being the series finale. Of course, there is a reasonable concern that this film could play EXACTLY like ‘Twilight Saga: New Moon,’ which opening on the same weekend last year and had an almost identical weekend pattern (18% [...]
