I would've been impressed if "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" had settled for just crushing the midnight opening ticket sales record, with a $22 million haul compared to former top dog "The Dark Knight"'s $18 mil. But no. That's not good enough for The Boy Who Lived. Or perhaps I should say, The Boy Who Makes Bank.
Mid-week opening be damned, "Half-Blood Prince" earned a dizzying $100 million worldwide in its first 24 hours of release, according to a report in Variety. Maybe it wasn't such a great idea to delay the "Potter" IMAX opening in favor of "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen"....
Variety notes that "Half-Blood Prince" will live in 4,275 theaters domestically as of this weekend, running on something in the neighborhood of 15,000 screens. Analysts predict that the 5-day opening will be at least as strong as the $139 million that "Order of the Phoenix" earned in the same amount of time.
"Half-Blood Prince" set records here in the U.S., but it's been making waves overseas as well. The boy wizard posted the third-highest all-time opening in the UK ($7.6 million) and Australia ($4.4 million), and the second-highest all-time opening in Italy ($4 million). It also climbed to #1 in Holland, earning $1.3 million during its first hours in release.
Before "Prince" even opened, online ticket retailer Fandango was reporting that more than 2,500 midnight showings had sold out. It accounted for 98% of the site's ticket sales, moving an average of 8 each second. The numbers put "Potter"'s pace ahead of even the "Twilight" juggernaut, though I suspect that "New Moon" will give The Boy Who Made Bank a run for his money when it opens in November.
Since so many of you out there have already seen "Potter," is anyone out there left who HASN'T? Are you going to check it out this weekend? Do you think "New Moon" has any hope of topping these figures?
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