Having set new box office records even before its official UK and US releases, its no surprise that Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone is making news in every territory as soon as it is released.

In Germany, Potter has broken Men In Black's four year record of 1.95m admissions for an opening weekend by registering 2.5m tickets sold for the four days from November 22-25 and an average of over 2,000 admissions per print.

Thanks to Potter, the weekend was one of the most successful on record and the second best this year: in February, the simultaneous release of What Women Want and Hannibal saw around a total of 3.7m cinema-goers on their opening weekend, compared to the 3.5m which Harry Potter and the other releases are expected to have attracted this weekend.

Meanwhile, across Scandinavia, Potter has already grossed more during its first week-end than most films manage to achieve during their entire run.

In Denmark, the film grossed an astonishing $1,283,153 from just 89 screens, while in Sweden, it took $1,525,827. In Finland, Potter made $747,692 with admissions of 98,688, easily beating the local record set by Rose Of The Rascal earlier this year.

In Norway, Potter took a week-end gross of $1,076,856 with admissions of 165,623 and looks likely to trounce even the popularity of local hit Elling, which so far has achieved a total gross of $4,643,90.

Meanwhile, in Singapore, Potter-mania has seen the film easily become the biggest opener of the year so far with its opening day's gross of $428,972 (including sneak previews), while in Holland, the film's opening four-day weekend take of $1.4m (without previews) beat all-comers (including previews). Likewise in Taiwan, the movie scored a record opening with its $1.7m take and further box-office records are expected to tumble when the film opens across other markets, including Japan, Australia and Spain next weekend.