TIME WARNER SALES UP; SHARES DOWN

Home video sales of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 helped lift Time Warner’s second-quarter results above analysts’ expectations. Although the company’s Warner Bros. division spent heavily on pre-release marketing and publicity for the the theatrical release of Part 2 — dropping its operating margin slightly below that of the year-ago quarter — […]

TICKET SALES PLUMMET POST THANKSGIVING

The weekend after Thanksgiving ordinarily amounts to the famine following the feast for the nation’s theater owners, but this year the takings were particularly lean. According to box-office trackers fewer tickets were sold last weekend than on any post-Thanksgiving weekend since 1997. Overall receipts came to $88 million. down 11.5 percent from the comparable weekend […]

TANGLED CLIMBS TO TOP OF BOX OFFICE

The weekend after Thanksgiving typically sees a lot of empty seats in theaters — and there were even more of them than usual this year. The only film to live up to expectations was Disney’s Tangled, which took in an estimated $21.5 million. But results for Warner Bros.’ Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part […]

AFTER THANKSGIVING, TIME FOR LEFTOVERS

On the weekend following the big Thanksgiving holiday — when four films opened wide — only a single entry, The Warrior’s Way is vying for attention — and it is likely to find it in short supply. The R-rated martial-arts movie, filmed in New Zealand in English and Korean, has been tracking poorly, with young […]

HARRY WINS BY A HAIR OVER TANGLED

The weekend box office proved to be tighter than any analyst had expected. Final figures showed that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 earned $49.09 million. But Disney’s Tangled was close behind with $48.77. In fact just $320,049 separated the two leaders. Paramount/DreamWorks Animation’s Megamind, meanwhile, continued its remarkable run, falling just 21 […]

HARRY CONQUERS THE WORLD

With a delayed debut in France of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and the second week doing solid business everywhere else, the film earned $113.2 million overseas, bringing its foreign gross to $389.2 million, Reuters reported today (Monday). France’s opening topped all other sites with $19.1 million at 994 venues. Next was […]

WHO WILL CAST THE BIGGEST SPELL AT BOX OFFICE?

Four new movies are arriving at theaters over the Thanksgiving holiday, including what some are saying will likely be Disney’s last animated feature based on a popular fairy tale, Tangled. But none of them is likely to earn more than Week 2 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, analysts say. The penultimate […]

HARRY POTTER RULES THE WORLD

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 may have set no opening-weekend records domestically (with the arguable exception of its earning more on IMAX screens than any previous film), but it shattered records in some foreign markets, where it opened on the same day that it did in the U.S. The Warner Bros. film […]

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS IS LEAKED

The first 36 minutes of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 landed online Monday night, sending BitTorrent sites into overdrive on Tuesday. Wired.com, which was the first news outlet to take notice of the posting, quoted a Warner Bros. spokesman as saying, “This constitutes a serious breach of copyright violation and theft of […]