'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' on its way to a magical weekend

By Sarah Sluis

This weekend, it's all about Potter. The 6th film in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, earned $100 million in 24 hours. $58.2 million came from its 4,235 U.S. theatres, and the other $45.8 million came from theatres abroad. No wonder Warner Bros. has decided to make the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, into two films. Most critics enjoyed the latest trip to Hogwarts, and took particular interest in seeing how the stars have grown up. Our reviewer Doris Toumarkine found the "packed" film to be "great fun and engaging populist movie entertainment, even at 153 minutes and even for those of voting age." By appealing to fans and casual viewers alike, I suspect that it will do business for much longer than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which slightly bested Half-Blood Prince's debut. Plus, next weekend the film will open on IMAX screens, after Transformers finishes its one-month run, which will boost its box office. Fan response, too, has been overwhelming. I'm getting a huge kick out of the "hp6" Twitter search, a multilingual homage to the muggles' excitement.

Releasing on just 27 screens, (500) Days of Summer is opening small in the hopes of setting off a snowball of word-of-mouth endorsement. I interviewed director Marc Webb before the film's release, and blogged my initial reaction back in April. One of the big pluses of (500) Days is that it allows you to watch a romantic comedy without having to endure the exact same contrivances with only slightly different set-ups. While A. O. Scott from the New York Times is quick to point out all the ways (500) Days hews to the generic conventions of a romantic comedy, he also concedes that the Memento-type plot structure "restores a measure of the suspense that is usually missing from the romantic-comedy genre, which relies on climactic chases to the airport and ridiculously contrived choices between rival mates." Our critic Doris Toumarkine suspects that "(500) Days should emerge a summer winner. The little film that could and does is smart, funny, real, surprising, and hits the bull's-eye on all production counts." While almost everything about this film is positive, up until the point some people declare it treacly and syrupy sweet, I'm curious as to how, and when, this film will really catch on. Fox Searchlight would certainly like Juno, Little Miss Sunshine or Garden State-type success. Unlike with films that release wide, Searchlight will have the opportunity to tweak their marketing campaign over the coming weeks to make sure this film sparks. Each of those three films slowly increased the theatres in their release over a period of eight weeks, so it may be until the end of summer before (500) Days of Summer can be evaluated on the indie success scale.

I will be on vacation next week, so I'll see you back on July 27th.