The Hallows were far from deadly for Harry Potter and his mates. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 worked its magic on the box office and conjured more than $125 million this weekend, according to boxofficemojo.com. It’s technically the biggest take of any Harry Potter film ever (though if you factor in inflation, Deathly Hallows is still beat by the series’ first installment). How dominant was Hogwarts’ crew? They made twice as much as the next nine movies combined. That’s a whole lot of butterbeer.
Megamind continued its strong run, pocketing $16.2 million for second place, while Denzel Washington’s Unstoppable screeched into third with $13.1 mil. The Next Three Days, the only other big new release of the week, could only muster a fifth-place showing (behind Due Date) with $6.8 million—barely walking-around money by Hollywood standards.
Surprised by Harry Potter’s showing? Me neither. The series is money when it comes to money. But even though these Potter films are, in some ways, a known quantity by now, Plugged In still goes into high alert with every new release: It’s a complicated product for us to wade through, what with its good vs. evil themes, use of magic and ever-darkening storylines. We want to make sure we get it just right.
Moreover, the films are arguably growing more spiritual. While this latest installment is said to drag in places, Briallen Hopper suggests that may be because our characters are in a sort of Old Testament-inflected wilderness. From his column in the Huffington Post:
For most of the rest of the movie, the drama is no longer about battles with external forces of darkness. Instead, the suspense is about whether Harry, Ron, and Hermione can remain faithful to the beliefs they've inherited, and to each other. They are battling the darkness within. Many of the epic struggles of Deathly Hallows take place in silence, as one of the young people quietly keeps watch in a deserted British landscape, dwarfed by an endless sky. Sometimes the struggles take place in fraught fights within the group, as they argue over why they're still wandering, whether they're heading anywhere, and how they can diffuse the tense relationships of leadership and loyalty between each other. Even Ron and Harry's dramatic show-down with a horcrux is ultimately less a throw-down with evil than it is a struggle with their own doubt and self-doubt, and with the limits of their loyalty.
I think Adam Holz did a bang-up job for us in his review this go-round, but now I’m interested in your take. Did you see Deathly Hallows? How was it? And what do you think of the series itself?
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