The first half of the Harry Potter finale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 opened with a series' best $125.1 million, the second best November bow ever after Twilight: New Moon’s $142.8 million debut and the sixth biggest opening weekend of all time.  Given ticket price inflation, the new Potter movie slightly trailed Goblet of Fire in the number of ticket buyers, but nearly matching the opening weekend attendance of the top film in a series is no mean feat for the seventh installment in a franchise, especially given the fact that Warner Bros. has split the final Potter volume into two parts, so fans knew they weren’t going to get the final confrontation with Lord Voldemort.  57% of the opening weekend audience for Deathly Hallows was female and 56% was under 25 years old.

In spite of the strong debut for Deathly Hallows, the box office was down a substantial 24% from last year when Twilight: New Moon and The Blindside dominated the box office.  Deathly Hallows’ total was aided by a potent $24 million from its midnight Thursday shows and brought in a stellar $12.4 million from a record 239 IMAX theaters.  The Deathly Hallows was even more potent overseas where it brought in $205 million, giving Warner Brothers a mammoth $330 million worldwide opening weekend.

The Russell Crowe thriller The Next Three Days came a cropper, averaging just $2,633 per venue at 2,564 theaters for an estimated total of $6.8 million, which is less than half of what Crowe’s 2009 thriller State of Play earned in its debut.  Since State of Play earned just $37 million domestically, the prospects for The Next Three Days are not exactly rosy.  Crowe’s new film attracted an older (83% over 25) and slightly female (55%) audience.

The 3-D animated feature Megamind, the box office leader for the past two weeks, suffered its steepest decline (45%) at the hands of the new Potter film, but the superhero-themed cartoon still managed to earn $16.2 million and top the $100 million mark.  Its seventeen-day total is $109.5 million, a solid performance, but still well behind Despicable Me, which managed to bring in $161.3 million in the same amount of time this summer.  Megamind will also get more direct competition this week when Disney opens the 3-D animated feature Tangled on Wednesday.

The Denzel Washington runaway train flick, Unstoppable fell just 42% in its second weekend and finished in third place with an estimated $13.1 million, while the “R-Rated” Tod (The Hangover) Phillips comedy Due Date dropped a similar 41% and ended up in fourth with an estimated $9.2 million.

The comic book-based Red fell 50%, but remained in the top ten for the sixth consecutive weekend.  The DC/Wildstorm-based movie added $2.5 million to its total.  The $58 million “geriaction” film has now earned $83.6 million and still has a very slight chance of eventually reaching the $100 million mark.

Another comic book-based film, Stephen Frears’ Tamara Drewe expanded its run slightly with the addition of 13 art house theaters (for a grand total of 34), but it still hasn't made much of an impression with a seven-week total of just $331,000.

As predicted here last week the low budget science fiction film Skyline headed for Tierra del Fuego as it plummeted 71% in its second frame, a victim of bad reviews and even worse word-of-mouth.  In the age of Twitter, the adverse effect of immediate audience feedback to a turkey like Skyline is often apparent in steep declines from Friday to Saturday on the film’s opening weekend.