Weekend Box Office (07/18/11): Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II dethrones The Dark Knight, earning $169.1 million in its opening weekend.

The Harry Potter series finished where it started, at the top of the box office with a record breaking opening weekend. Nine-and-a-half years ago, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone opened the series with a $90.2 million, breaking the 4.5 year old opening weekend record set by The Lost World: Jurassic Park ($72 million).  Over the next 9.5 years, said record was broken four more times, with the last such toppling this very weekend three years ago with The Dark Knight's $158 million Fri-Sun take.  With nearly ten years of anticipation, The Boy Who Lived has returned to the top of the opening weekend charts with a massive $169.1 million Friday-Sunday gross.  That includes a record $91 Friday (best single day, best opening day, best Friday) which in turn included a record $43.5 million at 12:01am alone.  As expected, the picture was massively front-loaded, ending the weekend with the second-smallest weekend multiplier on record, 1.85x (for newbies, weekend multiplier is the final weekend total divided by the first day).  It also set another 'negative' record, earning 25.7% of its weekend total in those Thursday at 12:01am showings alone (the previous such record was set by the last Harry Potter film, which grossed 19% of its $125 million Fri-Sun haul at midnight).

Review: Winnie the Pooh is feather-light and subtly clever family fare.

Winnie the Pooh
2011
72 minutes
rated G

by Scott Mendelson

This won't be the longest review I've ever written, as there is little to say other than a list of tempered superlatives.  Winnie the Pooh is exactly what a Winnie the Pooh movie should be, no more and no less.  It is quaint, gentle, subtle wicked and as cozy as a blanket just out of the dryer.  Running just under an hour after a five-minute short film (a surprisingly poignant fable involving a homeless dragon) and before the closing credits, the picture is a perfect introduction to the age-old Pooh mythology to a generation raised on somewhat more complicated and more visually frantic cartoons of our modern times.  It is beautifully animated with lush, but simple, 2D hand-drawn animation, with eager vocal performances to go with it.  If you're merely in the mood for a harmless but intelligent and thoughtful family cartoon to bide the time between Pixar and DreamWorks epics, it is as perfect a choice as can be imagined.  If you are a genuine fan of Winnie the Pooh, well, imagine you're a Batman nerd walking into The Dark Knight...