Coming off the biggest box-office opening ever, the eighth and final Harry Potter movie [5] just experienced the biggest second-weekend decline of all time for any blockbuster.
The Warner Bros. film declined 72 percent from its record $169.2 million domestic opening to just $47.4 million.
A Warner Brothers executive attributed the steep fall-off to the stratospheric opening, including a $43.5 million haul for the mid-week midnight show that was included in the weekend figure.
Plenty of films have experienced bigger percentage drops in their second weekends of release, but none of them were in the elite blockbuster class of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2."
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In fact, among the 36 films that experienced bigger percentage drops than "Deathly Hallows, Part 2" in weekend No. 2, only three films opened to more than $20 million, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com.
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And only one film on that list, Warner's 2009 reboot of "Friday the 13th [8]," managed to crack the $40 million mark (it opened to $40.6 million).
Among blockbusters with domestic openings over $100 million, only one film, Summit Entertainment's "Twilight Saga: New Moon [9]," which dropped 70 percent, has a weekend-to-weekend decline in the same league.
Avid fan support, which causes pent-up demand to be released in a big opening-weekend rush, factors in here.
Like the Potter films, the Twilight saga is book-driven and usually features a big midnight performance on each installment's first day in theaters.
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But even for the Potter franchise, 72 percent is big. At 62.7 percent, 2004's "Prisoner of Azkaban [11]" was the series' previous biggest weekend-two decliner; 2001's "Sorcerer's Stone [12]" dropped just 36.3 percent.
Alarm bells, however, are hardly going off at the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank, Calif.
"Deathly Hallows, Part 2" has grossed $560.4 million so far internationally. And with $833.9 million in the bank so far, the film is still on pace to be the only movie in the Potter series to break the $1 billion barrier globally.