Weekend Box Office (11/28/10): Tangled and Harry Potter 7 face off over crowded Thanksgiving. Burlesque, Faster, Love and Other Drugs open soft.

Like a combination of Thanksgiving holidays past, it was a combination of Harry Potter holding down the fort against all newcomers, while a Disney animated property broke out of the gate. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I still won the three-day and five-day weekend derby, but Disney's Tangled had a smashing debut that set a record for a three-day opening weekend for a standard Disney cartoon (IE - not Pixar). The Disney fairy-tale scored $48.7 million over the Fri-Sun portion of the weekend and amassed a whopping $68.7 million since opening on Wednesday. Inflation and 3D price-bump aside, this best the $42 million opening of The Lion King way back in summer 1994 (which was one of the top-five opening weekends ever at the time). It's also the second-largest Thanksgiving opening weekend in history, behind the $80 million five-day and $59 million three-day opening weekend of Toy Story 2 back in 1999 (that $57 million debut was the third-biggest ever at the time). The lesson here is a simple one: Disney REALLY should have opened The Princess and the Frog in wide release over Thanksgiving last year.

Review: Faster (2010)

Faster
2010
95 minutes

rated R

by Scott Mendelson

The most surprising thing about Faster is that it's not. It's not a thrill-a-minute action romp, nor does it even qualify as trashy exploitation fare. It's a genuine drama and a thoughtful, occasionally moving character study. It is, at its core, a look at three damaged souls who must choose whether to cling to their convictions or let it go for the sake of their humanity. Faster may not satisfy hardcore action junkies and/or gore hounds, but it earns points for being a real movie with a token amount of substance.