'Tangled' Bumps 'Potter' to Take Domestic Weekend Box Office's No. 1 Spot With $21.5 Mil

[Sunday, December 05, 2010]
'Deathly Hallows' earns another $16.7 mil, lands in second place; 'Warrior's Way' just barely fights its way into the top 10.
That princess with really long hair has untangled her Harry Potter problem.

Disney's Tangled, an animated adventure based on the Rapunzel fable, rang up $21.5 million during the weekend to top the domestic heap in the 3D release's sophomore session in multiplexes.

Warner Bros.' Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 settled for second place after two frames atop the box-office rankings, fetching $16.7 million in the latest session for an incredible $244.2 million in cumulative box office through the action fantasy's third weekend. That puts it comfortably ahead of any of the six previous Potter pictures for a similar span of time.

Tangled continued to draw about 55% of its business from 3D screens, but Disney distribution boss Chuck Viane said he was pleased with the strength both of 2D and 3D receipts.

"Quality rises to the top," Viane said. "Meantime, we have the holidays ahead of us, and therein lies the strength of our long-term prospects."

Despite a 56% weekend-over-weekend decline, Tangled totes a $96.5 million cume since unspooling on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

Three other films posted satisfactory second frames, despite prospective moviegoers' preoccupation with the start of holiday shopping in an annual problem for Hollywood during the first weekend of December:

* Sony Screen Gems' song- and dance-filled Burlesque slid 49% to $6.1 million in a third place tie with Fox's Unstoppable; the bronze medalers carry cumes of $27 million and $68.9 million, respectively.

* Fox's romantic comedy Love and Other Drugs dropped 42% to $5.7 million in fifth place and a $22.6 million cume.

* CBS Films' Dwayne Johnson actioner Faster tumbled 55% to $3.8 million in eighth place and an $18.1 million cume.

The weekend's only wide opener -- Relativity-distributed martial arts Western The Warrior's Way -- unspooled unimpressively in ninth place, fetching just $3.1 million from 1,622 theaters, or less than half the number playing Tangled.

Collectively, the top 10 films rang up $75 million, or 14% less than top performers in the same frame last year. That's the third consecutive year-over-year weekend downtick for the holiday box-office season, which began the weekend before Thanksgiving.

Warrior's Way was produced by a trio of companies for $42 million and distributed for a fee by Relativity. Newcomer Sngmoo Lee directed a cast that includes Dong-gun Jang, Geoffrey Rush and Kate Bosworth in a tale about a professional assassin hiding out in the American Badlands.

The R-rated pic attracted opening audiences comprised 65% of males, with a similar 65% of patrons aged 25 or older.

"The opening results, while modest, didn't fall far below expectations as the campaign and [marketing] spend were very targeted," a Relativity spokesman said.

Looking ahead, two movies open wide on Friday: Fox's action fantasy The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Sony's action thriller The Tourist, starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp.