Warner Bros. kicked off what likely will be a boffo opening weekend for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1," launching the film at 3,700 midnight runs for a late-night take of $24 million.
Pic screened at a record-setting 238 domestic Imax screenings, contributing $1.4 million, which surpassed the company's previous $1 million midnight record holder "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse."
Overall, "Hallows" fell short of catching "Eclipse's" $30 million late-night record, though that film benefited from a more rabid young femme demo and a shorter runtime, as well as its less restrictive summer berth.
Warner will screen "Hallows" this weekend at 4,125 U.S. locations.
Still the biggest non-Twilight midnight showing ever. Anyone who argues that this number is disappointing is just fooling themselves, I'm just saying that in advance.
As of right now, HP7 is running 10% ahead of the last HP (that one came out on a Wed in July). The current average for HP7 is $6,300/theatre. That's 2,000 less than the last HP movie that came out in November (in 2005). And it's 4,400!!! lower than the last Twilight movie that ended up opening to $142M.
And the Twilight movies cost 1/5 of the HP movies.
The last HP movie to be released at this time of year was the Goblet of fire, it gross 35.4% of its total gross during its opening weekend. New Moon was also released at this time of year and it grossed 48.2% of its total gross during its opening weekend.
That's because Summit can't afford to spend the same amount on the Twilight movies. Then again they don't need to spend much on them, there's not much to them.
