Harry Potter the Half-Blood Prince, Crownd King!!

Harry Potter ruled. Brüno met Doom.

The weekend box office was the domain of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which followed up its big Wednesday opening with a big $79.5 million Friday-Sunday, per estimates, pushing its overall take to $159.7 million.
Sacha Baron Cohen's Brüno, meanwhile, saw ticket sales plunge 73 percent from last weekend, a drop that put the comedy in the inglorious company of all-time free-fallers such as The Real Cancun, The Adventures of Pluto Nash and videogame bust Doom.

Here's how Half-Blood Prince stacked up against its Harry Potter elders (and, for those ardent Edward Cullen boosters, Twilight, too):

• After five days, Half-Blood Prince is the highest-grossing Potter film thus far (or thus short) into its run.
• As far as opening weekends go, Half-Blood Prince's is only the series' fifth biggest ever. But that's because it opened on a Wednesday, not a Friday, like four of the other five Potter movies.
• The best way to judge how Half-Blood Prince is doing is to look at what Order of the Phoenix did. The fifth Potter movie also was a Wednesday opener. Half-Blood Prince outdid Order of the Phoenix's opening weekend by about $2.5 million; it outdid its first five days by a fat $20 million. (Order of the Phoenix is no slouch, by the way—overall, it is the second-biggest grossing Potter film.)
• For the record, Twilight opened very big ($69.4 million), but not as big as Half-Blood Prince, or any other Potter movie yet released, which doesn't take away from Twilight's overall very-bigness. Now can't we all get along?
• About the only film that makes Half-Blood Prince look like a slacker is The Dark Knight. Compared to a year ago, when the Batman movie was enjoying a $158.4 million (!) Friday-Sunday debut, this weekend's box office business was down nearly 40 percent.
• Brüno didn't do much to boost Hollywood's bottom line. In its second weekend, the button-pushing comedy fell from first to fourth, and from $30.6 million to $8.4 million.


----- original article found at eonline.com