Subtitle: WTF was Regal Entertainment Group thinking?

Here’s the thing: I’m super excited about this film.  I saw it this morning, and it was mindblowingly awesome. 

But I worked at a movie theatre for longer than I’d like to admit, so I have opinions on the workings of the business - particularly in Bellingham, WA where I spent most of my theatre years.  So if you don’t care about my rant about film bookings, skip to the text AFTER the awesome Harry Potter poster.

Let’s talk about midnight grosses for a second… 

1. $30+ million: Twilight Saga: Eclipse
2. $26.3 million:  Twilight Saga: New Moon
3. ~24 million: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (estimate)
4. 22.2 million: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
5. 18.5 million: The Dark Knight

Now, bookings-wise, I’d like to note that every. single. one. of these films opened in Bellingham at the Bellis Fair 6, except for HPDH which opened at the Sehome 3 last night.  And every single one of these films needed to be interlocked on all 6 screens at the Bellis Fair AND have 3am shows added, from what I recall (I might be wrong on the Twilights).  [If you’re actually reading this and are not a movie theatre nerd, interlocking is when you run the same print of film through 2 or more projectors so that you can utilize more screens than you were booked for.]

So why in the world would a 3-plex be booked with such a giant film?  It’s just stupid.  They have the biggest auditoriums, but they still don’t seat more customers than the Bellis does as a 6-plex.  Of course they had to add 3am shows, they would have at the Bellis as well.  But it could have grossed so much more at the Bellis Fair because they simply could have fit more people inside.

And yes, the Sehome has handled the business for many other huge releases.  But to take the first half of the last Harry Potter and send it there, when every other Harry Potter has gone to Bellis and packed the houses…  ?????

I don’t understand.  Clearly.  But I had to get that off my chest.  /rant

Now it’s safe for the rest of you to read.  All 2 or 3 of you.

I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, today IN LONDON!  I don’t know why that’s so exciting, but it really was.  For some reason there were no midnight shows here, and I read that that was because Warner Brothers didn’t allow them in the UK for some reason.  That could be wrong, and I won’t go on a rant about that, don’t worry.

I didn’t want to see it too much later than the rest of my friends in the US, so I found the earliest show I could (9am) at my neighborhood Vue cinema.  So with the time difference, I was only an hour behind my Washington buds who saw the midnight.  I can live with that.

Some of you may know that Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is both my favorite book and my favorite movie of the series.  This new movie gave it a run for its money, for me, but I sort of wonder if people who haven’t read the book will be frustrated by the movie.  Really doesn’t matter, because I loved it.

It had me tearing up several times, and then it had great humor to lighten the darker moments.  Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) really shined this time, in my opinion.  They finally gave him something to do other than be the comic relief (though he still had plenty of great one-liners).  Also, he looked very nice - somewhere along the line it looks like he grew some muscles.  Of course, Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson were good too.

It ended very abruptly, which I expected.  So my only question is…  is it July 15th yet???

(and if you want one more movie theatre rant, here you go: clearly the print I watched today was not screened before being shown to the public, and probably the person who built the print did not pay much attention.  the movie itself was fine, but one of the trailers had a MASSIVE development error throughout the entire 2 minutes or so.  it was really painful to look at.  but luckily that was the only problem.)