Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 took the box office horcrux taking a jump on Thanksgiving Weekend by grossing an estimated $14.5 million on Wednesday alone. Trailing far behind with long blond hair is Tangled, Disney’s 3D toon, with $11.6 million.

Burlesque danced and sang in third place, with an estimated $2.8 million followed by another 3D toon holdover Megamind, which took in about $2.7 million. In fourth place is Love and Other Drugs, with an estimated $2.5 million ahead of Unstoppable with $1.9 million and then Faster, an opener, raced at sixth place, grossing $1.6 million.

The domestic box office should slow down today, but will pick up Friday and continue to draw the bucks through Sunday.

Is it just me or are reboots getting closer and closer to the original? Not only do we have a Spiderman reboot only a decade after the definitive movie version first hit our screens, but now one of the most iconic TV characters of the 90′s is being revived. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the 7-season series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, is set be remade for the big screen. Again.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Kuzui Enterprises, owners of Buffy, are developing a film of Buffy to be written by relative unknown Whit Anderson (at least it’s a she) for Warner Bros. Kuzui made the 1992 film flop of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was not liked by creator Joss Whedon. But Whedon worked with Kuzui to resurrect the character into a TV show which followed the teen as she battled vampires and demonds through high-school and into university. The show was known for its razor-sharp wit, self-awareness, and sense of irony, appealing to both sarcastic teens and adults alike.

However, Whedon (who seems to be cursed, what with his Firefly and Dollhouse shows being cancelled too soon, not to mention the financial flop that was his film Serenity, the disaster of the binned Wonder Woman film, and now the endless delay of horror film The Cabin in the Woods) has not been asked to be involved. He wrote a letter to E Online expressing his dissatisfaction:

With reboots being the major event of this decade (as Hollywood studios get increasingly fearful of the scary notion of originality), how soon before we see a reboot of Jason Bourne, of the Twilight franchise, or even Lord of the Rings? Let’s hope this Buffy remains in the ground.

Ah yes, Disney fare. Without the Pixar name attached to it, you’ve always got to be a little wary–sure, the kids are going to go nuts over it, quoting lines from the movie and acting out the parts for weeks to come after every new installment, but considering we’re settling in for the fiftieth Disney movie ever (at least, that’s what it said in the opening shots), we certainly can’t let Tangled go by without a good look.

Tangled is a rehashed story of Rapunzel, which in turn is kind of a rehash of Cinderella except with lots more hair. And this time it’s just a bit more preposterous by making our main character Rapunzel the daughter of a queen (yet another Disney princess for the mill!) who was herself healed by a flower that bloomed as a result of a drop of actual solar plasma coming in contact with earth. Apparently in Disney’s universe, this creates magical healing flowers instead of burning through the surface of the earth, but we can go along with it. It’s Disney, after all–if you’re not prepared for a few slaps in the face of all known physics, then you probably shouldn’t be in a Disney movie in the first place. Anyway, this time we’ve got Rapunzel locked in a tower in a bid to protect her magical powers from being useful for anybody except her “adopted mother”, who put her in the tower in the first place. But Rapunzel escapes with the help of a thief who’s a lot less dashing than he actually thinks he is (though to be fair if he WERE as dashing as he thought he was, enemies would simply surrender in his presence, as would every eligible virgin in the kingdom). Now, with Rapunzel’s adopted mother in hot pursuit, Rapunzel will wind up finding out just how Tangled her life really is.

Like the title says, this is a big whopping pile of Standard Disney More of the Same–not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily, but it is largely the same as any of a host of other Disney titles with a few new elements. Cuddly animal merchandise, check, flawed male hero courting the Disney Princess of the Week, check, Disney Princess of the Week, check, bad guy who’s scary enough to be credible but not so scary as to freak out the kids, check…all the basic elements are here, as though built according to a formula.

But let’s be clear: the kids will love this, especially the little girls who all want to be Disney Princesses themselves, and the little boys who don’t mind being the semi-dashing thief to aid and abet the Disney Princesses in the making. The grownups, meanwhile, will sigh and roll their eyes and look fondly forward to trying to explain to their little girl why they can’t swing around on their own hair even though the girl in the movie is clearly doing it. There will be logic holes aplenty, but for the most part, it will at least be entertaining for a while, and in the end, this counts for more than you’d think.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands Tangled a six out of ten for managing to not bungle the Disney Formula and instead stick to it so tightly that it looks like any of a dozen other Disney titles. You won’t leave feeling like you’d wasted ninety minutes, but it’s hardly going to make your life special.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 opening at the domestic B.O. was triumphant with a huge tally of an estimated $125.1 million, beating Harry’s previous top opener, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that tallied $102.7 million in November 2005.

Hallows also opened 239 domestic IMAX runs, which contributed to an estimated $12.4 million over the weekend. The IMAX runs of Hallows is the company’s biggest opening to date, surpassing Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, which debuted with $12.1 million.

Results:

1. Harry Potter…Deathly Hallows: Part 1
$125,100,000

2. Megamind
$16,200,000

3. Unstoppable
$13,100,000

4. Due Date
$9,200,000

5. The Next Three Days
$6,800,000

6. Morning Glory
$5,200,000

7. Skyline
$3,400,000

8. Red
$2,500,000

9. For Colored Girls
$2,400,000

10. Fair Game
$1,500,000

(Source)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 enchanted the movie goers and won Friday’s box office, earning an estimated $61.2 million that includes about $24 million from its midnight opening.

Way down in numbers with a 49% drop, in second place, is Unstoppable with about $4.075 million while not far behind is Megamind, earning about $3.7 million in third place. Due Date is next in line with an estimate of $2.9 while The Next Three Days collected about $2.2 million, rounding out the top five for Friday.

All in all, it looks like Mr. Potter and his friends (or enemies) are setting the pace for the 2010 holiday movie box office.

Harry Potter 7 Pt. 1 launched at 3,700 midnight runs that took in $24 million. The theater where I saw the 12:01am run had, according to an usher, 2,500 people attending one of many showings during the midnight run.

Overall, the movie screened at a record-setting 238 domestic IMAX screenings, contributing $1.4 million, which surpassed Warner Bros. previous $1 million midnight record holder The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. However, Hallows fell short of catching Eclipse’s $30 million late-night record.  

Attending a midnight run of a very popular movie is something to behold.  It is an electrifying experience that I’ll do again next July when HP7 Part 2 opens.

Here we go, folks, the crazy train is leaving the station and it’s got a big old “Hogwart’s Express” stamped on the front of it.  It’s quarter of three in the morning and I’ve just got back from the 12:01 showing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One, featuring a whole load of kids who will probably be useless in school tomorrow, and I’m not just talking about the ones in the movie. You just read my cohort Eoin’s take on this particular matter, and now you get my shot at it. And the best part? I’m not at all happy.

We join Harry and company in the midst of the beginning of the end, as Voldemort and his assortment of cronies are running riot in the world of wizardry and planning to take it to the non-magical Muggles on a scale that can only be described as pure Cobra Commander in its genocidal glee. Naturally, Harry and company find this distasteful, and are out to round up Voldemort’s collection of Horcruxes, or, random objects that hold chunks of Voldemort’s life force / power / chi / whatever ridiculous concept’s been cobbled up to try and explain this mush.

You would think that, by about the third installment of a seven or eight film franchise, you’d pretty much have all the names and places and concepts you needed down, and that you could run the events of the world just fine with what you have on hand. Not Harry Potter, oh no. Rowling’s going to be tossing brand new names and concepts out there like we’re still back in book one.  Harry will have somehow learned a panoply of new spells that actually have some offensive use for a change, there will be a whole collection of strange new objects that are somehow vital to the entirety of the film but were never so much as mentioned (that I recall, anyway) before hand, and all sorts of new characters, new places, and new nouns aplenty.

The entire film feels rushed and yet still overlong, with events that should have been huge being glossed over (for instance, the death of Mad-Eye Moody, a big character in previous installments, was essentially reduced to one character–I think it was a Weasley–saying “Oh yeah, by the way, Mad-Eye Moody’s dead.” in roughly the same tone of voice one reserves to mention that a party host is out of shrimp puffs), and events that are ridiculously insignificant being dragged out for several minutes (like Harry’s baffling insistence that Dobby must be buried. With full honors. And no magic. And where the hell did he get the shovel, anyway?). And all the while, things I never knew existed kept popping up, like Hermione’s Preposterously Oversized Handbag, or the strange medical condition that just suddenly hit Ron and tore open his arm while they were teleporting all over England.

And I’m sure that someone, somewhere, has an explanation for how Dobby manages to teleport everywhere that regular wizards can’t, yet somehow, elves are the slave race. Seriously, what’s with that? Harry Potter’s locked in a basement that no one can teleport out of because it’s so very enchanted, not even the absolute chosen king of all wizardry Harry Potter, but here’s Dobby. Oh, sure, it’s absolutely no problem to the only elf in the movie that just learned how SHOES WORK.

The only problem is, I don’t particularly care what that explanation is. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a big, shiny disaster of poor writing, worse adaptation, and acting that to this second makes me cringe, with the lone exception of Helena Bonham Carter, who still plays lunatics like an absolute champ. And don’t even get me started on all the shakycam work. This movie had enough wobbly frames to make me wonder if Voldemort had recently recruited the Blair Witch.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives an exasperated sigh and hands Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One a four out of ten. Oh, sure, it’s fun enough–there’s plenty of action to go around, but the writing is inches from pure incomprehensibility as a movie unaided by book knowledge. And to misquote Animal House: “Big, shiny and dumb is no way to go through life, son.”

Unstoppable started the weekend box office with a drive that was not powerful enough to stay in the lead and beat Megamind. The poster “No You Can’t” is clearly an appropriate message to the second place winner.

However, both films shared a wealth of money with Due Date in third place and Skyline taking fourth place.  Morning Glory arrived in fifth rounding out the top five movies.

Results:

1. Megamind
$30,100,000

2. Unstoppable
$23,500,000

3. Due Date
$15,500,000

4. Skyline
$11,700,000

5. Morning Glory
$9,600,000

6. Red
$7,500,000

7. For Colored Girls
$6,800,000

8. Paranormal Activity 2
$3,100,000

9. Saw 3D
$2,800,000

10. Jackass 3D
$2,300,000

(Source)

Unstoppable is the top money maker for Friday’s box office with an estimated $8.1 million.  In second place and not far behind is the 3D animated feature Megamind bringing in about $7.9 million while Skyline brought in about $4.7 million.

Due Date earned about $5.5 million taking fourth place while Morning Glory collected about $3.1 million. In sixth place is For Colored Girls earning around $2 million.

Megamind stayed at the top of the weekly box office, and looks like it might even take this weekend’s box office, but more about that in another post.

Results:

Megamind
$59,702,174 — $59.7

Due Date
$43,478,266 — $43.5

For Colored Girls
$24,170,188 — $24.2

Red
$11,690,981 — $74.7

Saw 3D
$10,117,153 — $40.7

Paranormal Activity
$2 $9,025,334 — $79.0

Jackass 3D
$6,690,734 — $112.4

Secretariat
$5,578,521 — $52.5

Hereafter
$5,420,680 — $30.1

The Social Network
$4,590,793 — $86.0

(Source)