Happy Friday! Time to get out of the house and face the next to last day you'll ever have your face violently rubbed in the opening of a Harry Potter movie. It's not as bad a scenario as it sounds, to be honest -- unless you're Russell Crowe and/or Paul Haggis, in which case, well, maybe think about sleeping in. Let's get to the forecast...
NATIONAL FORECAST
· Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1: The popular box-office rule of thumb about Harry Potter films is that you count on a jaw-dropping opening day of sold-out screenings followed by marked Saturday and Sunday declines as fans decompress. I don't know where this rule came from; the last Harry Potter film to open on a Friday was 2005's Goblet of Fire, which saw only an 8-percent drop in receipts from Friday to Saturday and 26 percent the day after that. Goblet ultimately did $102 million over three days -- and this was before the IMAX craze inflated the numbers, the midnight screening craze went out of control, and well before Muggles were confronted with the penultimate chapter in their beloved boy-wizard's adventures. Meanwhile, the entries in between -- 2007's Order of the Phoenix and last year's Half-Blood Prince -- each cleared $150 million in five-day opening frames.
So here we have Deathly Hallows kind of teetering between them -- on nearly 300 more screens than Goblet but with less time to threaten any real opening-weekend records. (Midnight records, though, are totally fair game.) But history suggests it should easily eclipse $130 million by Sunday, with the entire Thanksgiving holiday to mop up another $100 million by the week after. It won't have 3-D to bank on, but the franchise has followers loyal enough to know that's a good thing, so it kind of all cancels out. FORECAST: $132.5 million
· The Next Three Days: Paul Haggis's jailbreak thriller stars Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks, an attractive enough pairing for any parents desperate for something new to watch while their kids get their Potter on down the corridor at the multiplex. I can't really see why anyone else would go to this this weekend -- which isn't to knock the film, which I haven't watched. But come on! This has Netflix written all over it, and have you seen those dorks in the robes and wizard hats outside the theaters? You're not braving that for a Paul Haggis movie! That dude still owes you for Crash. (Give him credit for In the Valley of Elah, though, that was pretty damned solid.) FORECAST: $10.7 million
REGIONAL OUTLOOK
It's not an especially enthralling weekend to be an art-house moviegoer, I'm afraid, though there is the good news about 127 Hours picking up 86 screens; it very likely is now playing at a theater near you. Same goes for Fair Game, which expands even more aggressively into 211 additional venues. The Isabelle Huppert/Claire Denis collaboration White Material makes landfall in New York, Los Angeles, and on VOD, which isn't the worst way to spend two hours. I mean, Isabelle Huppert! Africa! Coffee! What could go wrong? Michelle Orange has more in her review. Good luck out there!