'Harry Potter' may live up to expectations
By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer
Please note: The following article is hereby guaranteed not to contain any cloying use of Harry Potter vocabulary (we promise, no ingratiating references to "muggles").
Nor will it rehash J.K. Rowling's ascension from single welfare mom to pop-culture icon, or join in the discussion as to how much 12-year-old Daniel Radcliffe does or does not look like the title character of the soon-to-be-released "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."
But that's all we can guarantee. For as much as hard-core Harry Potter fans cringe at the already-metastasizing hype surrounding the movie's premiere tomorrow, there are no Harry-free zones this month.
By all accounts, last week's sneak preview in London was enthusiastically received by its closed audience, and that has only heightened already lofty expectations for the film.
The day after the London premiere, shares of AOL Time Warner (parent company of Warner Bros., which holds the Potter rights) jumped 4.6 percent.
Movie houses across the United States are reporting record sales of advance tickets to the public opening. Moviefone, the ticketing company owned by AOL Time Warner, has reported that advance ticket sales for "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" are considerably higher than those for previous blockbusters, bolstering the belief that the film will become the biggest advance-ticketing movie ever.
In Hawai'i, Consolidated's Ward 16 complex sold about half of the 487 advance tickets available for tomorrow's 7 p.m. showing within a week. Signature's Dole Cannery 18-Plex reported more moderate advance sales for its 400-seat theaters. Tickets for the most popular opening-day time slot so far, 1 p.m., was about one-quarter sold after a week of advance sales.
Depending on how many of the country's nearly 7,000 movie theaters show the film, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" could hit the $75 million mark for its opening weekend. Disney's "Pearl Harbor" took in $75.2 million at the box office over the four-day Memorial Day weekend. One limiting factor is the movie's length — around two and a half hours — which means fewer showings per day than shorter films.
Projections for the movie's success are considered less speculative than those for "Pearl Harbor," "Monsters, Inc." and other highly anticipated releases in part because of Harry Potter's firmly established fan base.
The Harry Potter series has been a head-turning success since the first novel was published in 1997. Each successive book has been met with increasing anticipation, culminating with last year's trans-Atlantic vigil for the release of the fourth installment, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire."
"I started reading them a year ago just to see what all the fuss was about," says Honolulu resident Deb Matsukawa. "I did a crash course, reading all four in a row. I really want to see the movie."
Matsukawa is one of millions of adults who have extended the books' demographics beyond traditional children's literature boundaries. Over the last year, a confounding number of adult readers have chosen "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" over new releases by Don DeLillo, Alice Munro and John Irving.
"It's pure, easy escape reading," Matsukawa says. "I didn't have to think a lot about it. I liked that."
The all-ages appeal of Harry Potter has already proved a windfall for its U.S. publisher, Scholastic, which took in $200 million in revenue from the series last year.
Tomorrow's premiere should only stoke the flames. On Sunday, NBC News devoted a full-hour of "Dateline" to the making of the movie. For weeks, Wire services have been moving articles focusing on everything from Harry Potter investment strategies to the proper way to play Quidditch, a wizard sport described in the book.
While Warner Bros. has been rolling out a variety of Potter-themed items over the last year — everything from coffee cups to GameBoy games — the heart of the phenomenon lies squarely in the first four novels of the series (three more books are forthcoming). With an allegiance built over some 2,000 pages of reading, Potter fans are viewed as having the fortitude to sustain a very profitable extraliterary industry.
Some analysts are projecting that "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" will pull in $260 million to $300 million in its first year.
With such heady projections, it's small wonder that the second Harry Potter film has already started production.
