Despite having the best Wednesday ever, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix earned a relatively small sum of money for a five day release. Here’s how a handful of scribblers spun the numbers:

To Box Office Mojo, the big-Wednesday, small-weekend phenomenon is a sign of “burning off demand”–that is, the huge fans showed up at midnight on Wednesday, and there’s little to no potential for the sequel to build on word-of-mouth.

But don’t tell that to Paul Dergarabedian, the industry blurb whore recently targeted by New York Magazine who hints that the release of the final Harry Potter book next Saturday could
actually reinvigorate ticket sales. “They’ll be walking book in hand into the movie theater,” he promises. Gag.

So many blockbusters in the marketplace leave little room in the writeups for attention to indies, but there’s always space to gloat over the failure of torture porn. The New York Times devoted two paragraphs to Captivity’s sub-top-ten debut; Nikki Finke’s sole sentence on the matter can be reduced to two words: “how nice.” Meanwhile, HecklerSpray asks the rhetorical question that’s surely on everyone’s mind: “[License to Wed] is still in the weekend box office top five and a film where Elisha Cuthbert has to drink a milkshake made out of mashed-up eyeballs isn’t?”