‘Harry Potter’ Tops Box Office Again With $50 Million - BusinessWeek

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‘Harry Potter’ Tops Box Office Again With $50 Million - BusinessWeek: "Nov. 28 (Bloomberg) -- “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- Part 1” was the top movie of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday weekend, taking in $50.3 million in ticket sales over three days for Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros.

“Tangled,” Walt Disney Co.’s animated update of the fairy tale Rapunzel, opened with $49.1 million in sales at U.S. and Canadian theaters, researcher Hollywood.com Box-Office said today in an e-mailed statement. The film was one of four new movies in wide release this weekend.

The “Potter” films, Hollywood’s top-grossing franchise, are expected to generate $7.5 billion in ticket sales by the time the series ends in July with the release of an eighth movie, “Deathly Hallows -- Part 2,” the estimate of Warner Bros. Chief Executive Officer Barry Meyer. The first seven, based on the books by J.K. Rowling, all opened in first place.

“‘Harry Potter’ is one of those cultural phenomena,” said Chad Hartigan, a box-office analyst"