Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, retained its box office lead over the Thanksgiving weekend despite a strong challenge from newcomer Tangled.
Potter took in another $5o.3 million, raising its domestic total to $220.4 million in just ten days, with its worldwide total at a stunning $609.6 million in that brief time. Clearly audiences are vitally interested in seeing how the story turns out, and the film’s lack of some of the charms of its predecessors in the series has not held it back in the slightest.
Disney’s Tangled animated comedy based on the Rapunzel fairy tale did very well in the face of the Potter juggernaut, selling $49.1 million worth of tickets in U.S. theaters.
Other new releases didn’t do nearly as well: the musical Burlesque, starring Christiana Aguilera and Cher, finished at number four with a $11.8 million, the adult romance Love and Other Drugs (starring Hollywood elite favorites Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway) finished sixth with $9.9 million, and the Dwayne Johnson action film Faster got off to a slow start (well, somebody had to say it) with a 7th place finish at only $8.7 million.
As Jeff Goldstein, general sales manager for Warner Bros, was quoted as saying in the AP story on the week’s box-office results, Deathly Hallows 1‘s start as the highest-grossing Potter film “kind of tells you how big the last ‘Potter’ is going to be. If you look at films like `Lord of the Rings,’ when you get to the last one, anticipation is just overwhelming.”