‘Captain America’ Takes Down ‘Harry Potter’ at the US Box Office

It was the battle of superheroes and boy wizards this past weekend at the US box office and, somewhat unexpectedly, the former came out on top. Newcomer “Captain America” has ended “Harry Potter’s” reign, with a $65.8 million opening weekend.

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II” is still en route to becoming the biggest and best selling “Harry Potter” installment but, for the weekend, it was no longer top dog at the domestic box office.

Marvel’s “Captain America” made sure that happened. The comic book-inspired film, starring Chris Evans as the lead, went against the rather lukewarm reviews and had a spectacular 3-day weekend, AceShowbiz reports.

In making about $66 million, “Captain America” surpassed similar releases, though not by much.

“The sale number is on par with those of the previous superhero releases, ‘Thor’ ($65.7 million) and ‘X-Men: First Class’ ($55.1 million). It becomes the 48th largest opening for a comic book adapted film,” the e-zine reports.

As expected, the target audience for “Captain America” was mostly male (64%), mostly over 25 (58%). Once more, fans prove that negative reviews can influence only so little the debut of such a large-scale production.

“Captain America” was made on an estimated budget of $140 million.

As noted above, though down, “Harry Potter” is not out for the count. Besides holding strong at the international box office, it’s still bound to continue breaking records in the US too.

“‘Deathly Hallows 2’ goes down from the top to the runner-up position. After scoring the biggest opening weekend ever with $168.6 million, the last installment of the movie series now has to settle at the second place with additional $48.1 million,” AceShowbiz says.

“It pushes a total of $274.2 million in its ten-day of release, and is on the way to surpass the $317.6 million tally of the ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ and become the highest grossing ‘Harry Potter’ film,” adds the same media outlet.

Third place goes to another newcomer, Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis’ rom-com “Friends With Benefits,” which, with an opening of $18.5 million underperformed – and didn’t manage to top rival “No Strings Attached” of last year.

The rest of top 10 films of the US box office are as follows: “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” ($12 million), “Horrible Bosses” ($11.7 million), “Zookeeper” ($8.7 million), “Cars 2” ($5.7 million), “Winnie the Pooh” ($5.1 million), “Bad Teacher” ($2.6 million) and “Midnight in Paris” ($1.9 million).