Box Office: ‘Harry Potter’ Nabs Biggest Weekend Of Summer As ‘Interstellar’ Tops $700 Million

Bad Boys for Life earned just $3.2 million in China while Inception earned $1.6 million in 37 territories as Greenland topped $4.5 million worldwide thus far.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was rereleased in China this weekend, showing there for the first time in 4K and 3-D. The Chris Columbus-directed fantasy earned $13.6 million over its initial Fri-Sun frame, slightly below the projected $15 million guestimate but easily the biggest opening weekend for China since theaters reopened a month ago. $2.1 million of that, 17%, came from IMAX
IMAX
alone. The film earned $4.6 million on Friday, the biggest single-day gross anywhere since theaters closed earlier this year, besting South Korea’s Deliver Us From Evil which earned $4.5 million on its first Saturday over last weekend’s $14 million Wed-Sun debut. 2.96x weekend multiplier isn’t half-bad considering it’s a 19-year-old movie. All told, this brings the $125 million Warner Bros. release’s global cume to $991 million.

We’ll know in a few days whether it has enough magic left in the broom to fly past the $1 billion mark in raw global earnings. If it passes that milestone, it’ll be the third movie to do so thanks to a reissue, alongside The Phantom Menace in 2012 ($929 million in 1999) and Jurassic Park in 2013 ($913 million in 1993). With global cumes between $792 million (Prisoner of Azkaban) and $961 million (Deathly Hallows Part I) from 2002 to 2010, every single Harry Potter sequel would also have passed $1 billion in inflation-adjusted earnings. If Sorcerer’s Stone, the second-biggest movie of all time back in 2001 (behind Titanic), does the deed, it’ll join Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II ($1.342 billion in 2011) in the “mile high club.”

Bad Boys for Life earned just $3.2 million in its debut Fri-Sun frame in China. The Will Smith/Martin Lawrence action sequel, which earned $204 million domestic back in January, has now earned $426 million worldwide on a $90 million budget. The film joins the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog, Jojo Rabbit, Bloodshot and 1917 among films that didn’t quite catch on in China, although all but Bloodshot were already global hits anyway. We’re still dealing with a comparatively depressed marketplace, where Dolittle is the year’s top grosser with $18 million, but a lousy opening is a lousy opening. Will Smith’s defining star vehicles (Independence Day, Men in Black, Hancock, I Am Legend) didn’t play (or made very little money) in China back in the day, and this franchise has no cultural cachet.

The Eight-Hundred earned $2.07 million in pre-release previews, as the 2.5-hour, shot-entirely-in-IMAX World War II action drama is expected to be the first (by default) blow-out theatrical release anywhere since theaters reopened. The film was supposed to open last summer but was pulled at the list minute allegedly due to political considerations. While it’s expected to earn noticeably less in this current moment (around $160 million) than it might have had it opened last summer ($350-$450 million), it’s still going to almost certainly be the first new movie to top $100 million in any individual market and/or worldwide. The Huayi Bros.’ $80 million flick, concerning a small band of 400 Chinese officers defending the Sihang Warehouse against invading Japanese armies in 1937, opens nationwide in China on Friday.

Interstellar earned $1.69 million (-60%) in its second full weekend back in China (it opened on a Sunday two weeks ago), bringing its “new” cume to $16.07 million and its lifetime global cume past $700 million. The film is now the first live-action original to pass that milestone since Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity ($724 million) in 2013. The last one before that was Chris Nolan’s Inception which earned $824 million worldwide in the summer of 2010. The much-discussed reissue of Inception began this weekend in 37 markets (including Canada) for a total of $1.6 million. $640,000, 40%, of that came from IMAX screens alone. If it performs well in America next weekend it could be just enough to push the $292 million-grossing movie’s lifetime domestic cume past $300 million.

Finally, STX Entertainment’s and Gerard Butler’s Greenland, about a family struggling to stay together and survive as a potentially extinction-level comet hurtles toward Earth, earned topped the box office in nine new overseas territories this weekend, namely Taiwan, Singapore, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. France and Belgium continued to play equally strong with #2 holdovers in in their respective second and third weekends. The film earned $2.82 million from 1,063 locations and has now earned $4.55 million worldwide. Considering the whole “50% capacity and 75% showtimes” factor, this is a solid performance from one of our more commercially reliable (as long as your action movie doesn’t cost a fortune) movie stars. Ric Roman Waugh’s Greenland, which is pretty solid, opens domestically on September 25.