Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them's Opening Weekend Box Office Totals $75 Million

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the first film in the Warner Bros. new Harry Potter spinoff franchise, is off to a stellar start. Fantastic Beasts earned $75 million in its opening weekend at theaters.

The strong start helps reaffirms Warner Bros. $180 million investment in the movie, and the decision to turn the proposed Fantastic Beasts trilogy into a five-film saga.

While Fantastic Beasts' box office take is strong in its opening weekend, it is shy of Marvel Studios' own magical blockbuster, Doctor Strange, which opened with $85 million. It is also less than the 90.3 million opening weekend of the first Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. However, Fantastic Beasts doesn't have a legion of pres-sold comics fans to back it up the way Doctor Strange does, nor does it have a fandom already connected to its primary characters via an ongoing series of novels. We'll see how the Fantastic Beasts franchise does as its characters begin to endear themselves to fans, and some of the film's deeper connections to the Harry Potter series are revealed.

Marvel's Doctor Strange will slip into third place in its third week at the box office, earning $16.7 million and bringing its box office total to 180.6 million, behind DreamWorks Animation's Trolls, which earned 16.9 million for a running box office total of $115.7 million.

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In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the year is 1926, and Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) has just completed a global excursion to find and document an extraordinary array of magical creatures. Arriving in New York for a brief stopover, he might have come and gone without incident, were it not for a No-Maj (American for Muggle) named Jacob, a misplaced magical case, and the escape of some of Newt's fantastic beasts, which could spell trouble for both the wizarding and No-Maj worlds.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the screenwriting debut of Harry Potter author JK Rowling and is directing by Harry Potter movie veteran David Yates. Fantastic Beasts stars Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander with Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, Samantha Morton, Jon Voight, Carmen Ejogo and Colin Farrell.

In Marvel's Doctor Strange, Dr. Stephen Strange's (Benedict Cumberbatch) life changes after a car accident robs him of the use of his hands. When traditional medicine fails him, he looks for healing, and hope, in a mysterious enclave. He quickly learns that the enclave is at the front line of a battle against unseen dark forces bent on destroying reality. Before long, Strange is forced to choose between his life of fortune and status or leave it all behind to defend the world as the most powerful sorcerer in existence.