'Tangled' Unfurls $11.8 Mil Opening But 'Harry Potter' Still No. 1

Disney's Rapunzel tale reboot Tangled opened with a better-than-expected $11.8 million tally Wednesday but Harry Potter's box office magic could not be rivaled. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 maintained its No. 1 spell on moviegoers by adding an estimated $14.5 million to its coffers, bringing its six-day cume to $159 million.

Tangled, meanwhile, nabbed the day's second place spot and looks to be the overachiever of cinema's Thanksgiving holiday fare: the film will likely surpass its $40 million long weekend estimates by at least $10 million.

Sony/Screen Gems' Burlesque, starring Cher and Christina Aguilera, took the No. 3 spot Wednesday with a $2.8 million debut, followed by DreamWorks Animations/Paramount's Megamind at No. 4 and the Anne Hathaway/Jake Gyllenhaal romantic comedy Love and Other Drugs in fifth place with an estimated $2.2 million.

Another new film, the Dwayne Johnson actioner Faster, opened at No. 6 with a $1.6 million gross, while Unstoppable's $1.9 million kept it on track for a fifth place finish.

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Box Office Guru Wrapup: Harry Potter Enjoys Monster Opening

This weekend wizard fans united and sent the much-hyped fantasy sequel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 soaring to the number one spot with a massive opening weekend of $125.1M, according to estimates, making it the highest-grossing debut ever in the seven-film series. Launching ultrawide in 4,125 theaters, including a record 239 IMAX locations, the dark PG-13 adventure averaged a sensational $30,332 per site and ranks as the sixth best opening weekend of all-time behind The Dark Knight ($158.4M), Spider-Man 3 ($151.1M), The Twilight Saga: New Moon ($142.8M), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest ($135.6M), and this year's Iron Man 2 ($128.1M). IMAX accounted for 10% of the opening weekend tally with $12.4M with many upcoming shows already sold out.

For the wizard franchise, it was the best debut of any kind. The highest Friday-to-Sunday opening before was $102.7M for 2005's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire which launched on the same November Friday while the top gross for the first three days of release was $107M for the last installment, 2009's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which bowed on a Wednesday in the summer. Ticket price increases helped set a new franchise record as Hallows, Goblet, and 2001's original Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone each sold roughly 16 million tickets on opening weekend. The fan base has remained relatively constant but moviegoers pay more for a stub with every film.

Still, it was a monumental performance and ranks as the second best ever outside of the busy summer tentpole season behind just New Moon which attacked this very weekend last year. Deathly Hallows even performed the same way throughout the weekend with a 37% Friday-to-Saturday drop compared to Moon's 42%. Both franchises are based on wildly popular books with fans obsessed with coming out on the first day, especially for Thursday night post-midnight shows. The new Potter banked an incredible $24M for those showtimes.

Looking at the daily journey, the first half of the two-part finale exploded on Friday with $61.2M including midnight shows, fell sharply to $38.2M on Saturday, and is estimated by Warner Bros. to slide by 33% to $25.8M on Sunday. The turnout was extremely front-loaded with the opening day tally accounting for a whopping 49% of the weekend haul. Similarly, New Moon's first day was 51% of the three-day figure and it tumbled by 70% on the second weekend despite it being the Thanksgiving holiday.

Reviews were mostly positive for the new wizard tale and cast and crew made the usual rounds for their global publicity push including glitzy premieres on both sides of the Atlantic in London and New York. David Yates directed as he did for the last two installments and his final offering, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 is set to open next summer on Friday, July 15, in 3D two weeks after the third Transformers pic and a week before Captain America: First Avenger both of which will also be in 3D. The studio had wanted to make Part 1 in 3D but was unable to complete the conversion in time to make a product good enough for the fans.

Overseas, the latest installment was as gigantic as expected and grossed a colossal $205M from 54 countries and 91 markets resulting in a monstrous $330M global launch over the first weekend. The last film Prince bowed mid-week and debuted to $394M worldwide but over five days. Deathly Hallows set a new all-time opening weekend record in the U.K. with an estimated $28M haul. Other notable bows included $21.8M in Germany, $14.8M in Australia, $14M in Japan, $12.3M in Russia, $11.5M in Italy, $10.2M in Mexico, and $9M in China.

The 3D animated film Megamind was booted from the top spot after two weeks at number one and finished the weekend in a distant second place. DreamWorks Animation's latest hit held up reasonably well dropping 45% to an estimated $16.2M pushing the 17-day tally across the century mark to $109.5M. Paramount is still on a course to hit the $150M mark although Disney will unleash the rival 3D toon Tangled on Wednesday to give families another major option over the extended Thanksgiving holiday session.

Fox enjoyed an encouraging second weekend take for the Denzel Washington actioner Unstoppable which dropped 42% to an estimated $13.1M. The runaway train pic has taken in a solid $42M in ten days and is headed for the $75M vicinity.

Finishing in fourth place was the R-rated road trip comedy Due Date which declined by 41% to an estimated $9.2M. Warner Bros. has taken in $72.7M in 17 days and should end up in the $90-100M range depending on strength over the long Thanksgiving holiday.

Audiences gave the cold shoulder once again to Russell Crowe whose latest film The Next Three Days flopped opening to an estimated $6.8M. The PG-13 film about a teacher who desperately tries to break his wife out of prison averaged a weak $2,633 from 2,564 locations giving Lionsgate its worst debut in almost two years. Elizabeth Banks co-starred and Liam Neeson contributed a one-scene cameo while Oscar winner Paul Haggis directed. Crowe's last film - the expensive summer epic Robin Hood - barely inched its way over the $100M mark in North America and his recent adult dramas have mostly opened in the $13-14M range.

Paramount's TV industry comedy Morning Glory fell a moderate 43% in its second weekend grossing an estimated $5.2M to boost the ten-day total to a soft $19.9M. The Rachel McAdams film looks to end with $32-34M. Fellow sophomore Skyline completely fell apart thanks to poor buzz. The Universal release dropped 71% to an estimated $3.4M for a cume of $17.6M in ten days. With a reported production budget of $10M, plus plenty more for marketing, the alien flick could end with $21-23M. Summit's action hit Red grossed an estimated $2.5M, off 50%, for a $83.6M total.

Falling 63% to an estimated $2.4M was Lionsgate's For Colored Girls... which has banked $34.5M to date. Jumping into the top ten for the first time was the CIA thriller Fair Game which expanded in its third frame from 175 to 386 theaters collecting an estimated $1.5M. The average for the Summit release was a mild $3,808 and the sum rose to $3.7M.

The top ten films grossed an estimated $185.3M which was down 25% from last year when The Twilight Saga: New Moon opened in the top spot with $142.8M; but up 20% from 2008 when Twilight debuted at number one with $69.6M.

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First Half-Hour of New 'Harry Potter' Leaks Online

Muggles who can't wait until Friday to see the latest Harry Potter movie have been flocking to an extended tease circulating on illegal BitTorrent sites.

The first 36-minutes of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 leaked online early today, according to TorrentFreak, and thousands of fans have been searching for the footage.

Most movies find their way onto illegal file-sharing sites, of course, but studio antipiracy czars have especially vivid nightmares about pre-release leaks of major tentpole-type films (although it's still not clear what impact, if any, the leaks have on ultimate boxoffice, especially in theaters).

A source of the leak has not been idenfitied but Potter studio Warner Bros. says it is not taking the matter lightly.

"This constitutes a serious breach of copyright violation and theft of Warner Bros. property," the studio tells THR in a statement. "We are working actively to restrict and/or remove copies that may be available. Also, we are vigorously investigating this matter and will prosecute those involved to the full extent of the law."

Last year's installment of the Potter series ended up on the list of the most-pirated movies of year, with more than 8 million illegal downloads, according to the torrent-tracking site. The film also grossed $934 million worldwide.

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Steven Spielberg wanted to make ‘Harry Potter’ an animated franchise

On the front page of Sunday’s Los Angeles Times you can read a Hollywood history of the “Harry Potter“ property that I wrote with Claudia Eller, the business reporter who knows everybody who is anybody in the film industry. One of the many pearls that Eller brought to the collaboration was a fascinating insight into the early days of the brand — back when Steven Spielberg was still very much in the mix to guide “Potter” to the screen. Here’s an excerpt from that section:

Warner Bros. secured the rights for four “Harry Potter” novels for about $2 million. At that point, only the first book was on shelves in England and none had reached America. Warner Bros. tried to get a financial partner on the project, reaching out to studios including Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks, which passed.

Once the books became a sensation, greenlighting the first “Potter” film became a major priority at Warner Bros., where Alan Horn had recently taken over as president and Barry Meyer as chairman (replacing longtime studio chiefs Terry Semel and Bob Daly). DreamWorks circled back and proposed a partnership, but Horn wisely declined. There was one aspect of the DreamWorks talks that did intrigue him, however.

“I did think it would be worthwhile for Steven Spielberg to direct,” Horn said. “We offered it to him. But one of the notions of Dreamworks’ and Steven’s was, ‘Let’s combine a couple of the books, let’s make it animated,’ and that was because of the [visual effects and] Pixar had demonstrated that animated movies could be extremely successful. Because of the wizardry involved, they were very effects-laden. So I don’t blame them. But I did not want to combine the movies, and I wanted it to be live action.”

Spielberg instead took on Warner’s 2001 sci-fi film “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence,” and the Hogwarts post fell to Chris Columbus, director of “Home Alone” and “Mrs. Doubtfire,” who was then tapped for the job …

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http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2010/11/07/steven-spielberg-wanted-to-make-harry-potter-an-animated-franchise/?_r=true