Box Office Mojo is sharing the data with us that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 has taken the No. 1 spot at the box office on their ‘Opening Weekends’ chart with $168,550,000 opening weekend at 4,375 movie theaters.

This pushed The Dark Knight (2008) down to 2nd, Spider-Man 3 (2007) to 3rd, The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) to 4th, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) to 5th and Iron Man 2 (2010) to 6th.

Of note, Transformers 3 (Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)) is 20th.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you folks, the movie-goers, were looking forward to Harry Potter.  Just a hunch, really.

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Dollars Earned vs Tickets Printed

Whenever I see the TV movie news tout box office records, there’s always the thought in my head that every year a new box office record will be set due to how much movie ticket prices cost.  I then ask myself, but how many tickets were sold?

Right now, 10 people buying tickets for a movie today will set a box office record of versus  a movie that sold 300 tickets in its day.

I look at things like how people are now paying $15 for 3D tickets versus the days when folks paid $5 or less.  Heck, Gone with the Wind sold the most tickets (estimated) of any movie ever, at 202 million seats filled, at .23 cents per ticket in 1939!  (Cripes, GwtW is ranked at 95% in modern day’s website Rotten Tomatoes!  It still has staying power!) That’s why I like to balance out $ versus the number of tickets people bought.  Obviously the bottom line to a monetary records chart is the dollar earned, but I like to see how many people spent them.  That says more to me than the bucks burned.

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