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Reagen Sulewski: The Harry Potter franchise has always been hamstrung to some effect by the fact that a large proportion of its audience isn't paying full price for its tickets. By all rights, it'd have the record now if that wasn't the case. I definitely expect Warners to pull out a few stops to try and get it to the record mark, but I ultimately feel it's going to fall short.

This is payback for those times that Gladiator and Crash won Best Picture

Kim Hollis: The Next Three Days opened to $6.8 million. What went wrong here?

Josh Spiegel: I don't think this is a failure of marketing, and counterprogramming an adult-targeted thriller against Harry Potter makes sense. I think a big part of the problem is that there are still a lot of movies for adults still in theaters, such as The Town, The Social Network, Secretariat, Red, Unstoppable, and so on. The Next Three Days, while having a simple premise and a big star as the lead, just didn't ever seem like something I had to see. I'll probably check it out on Netflix, but it's not a priority right now. That could be the nail in this film's financial coffin.





Bruce Hall: Let's put aside, for a moment, the fact that opening against a Harry Potter film is suicide.

I do agree with Josh's assessment that if you are an adult who does not care for boy wizards and ancient prophecies, there are choices still out there. There are several viable options in the top ten, with even Secretariat still hanging around at number eleven. I am going to make the obvious suggestion that Russell Crowe's box office star has simply dimmed. For a time, his name was attached to almost any and every decent script floating around Hollywood. It still is, but he just doesn't seem to be getting those roles any more.

For the record, I reject the argument that he's "overrated". I just think that uneven choices with respect to the roles he's taken and poor decisions by studios who overestimate his appeal have softened his impact. Master and Commander was a thing of beauty, except for its terrible pacing. Another run through the editing room and we'd have had a different story. Meanwhile, Body of Lies was so laughably preposterous that not even pairing Maximus with Jack Dawson could save it. And Robin Hood..."Braveheart on Valium" is the nicest thing I've heard said about that one.

Personally, I'm a fan. But he doesn't always place himself in ideal situations and again - opening against Harry Potter, while not his decision - is still not a good one. And these sorts of results end up damaging Crowe the most. So to directly answer your question Kim, the easy answer to "what went wrong" is "Harry Potter." But I think that there's more to it than that. Unstoppable still managed to pull in $13 million in its second frame, so you can't tell me that there wasn't money out there somewhere.

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