Crazy Nikki, PR person
Nikki Finke trumpets that the Harry Potter films are the biggest box-office franchise of all time—or, as she breathlessly hedlines it, “Harry Potter Biggest Film Franchise Ever!”:
With the success of this summer’s Harry Potter And The Order of the Phoenix, Warner Bros announced today that its five Harry Potter films have combined to become the top-grossing film franchise worldwide in history. It surpasses even the box office total of all 22 James Bond and 6 Star Wars franchises, with two films yet to come — Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The combined worldwide box office gross for the five Harry Potter films to date is in excess of $4.47 billion even as The Order Of The Phoenix is still going strong in theaters around the globe. In addition to holding the franchise box office record, all five of the Harry Potter films are among the 20 top-grossing box office hits of all time.
This is, of course, the “Inflated Play Money™” box-office record beloved by studio publicists, those who have a need to suck up to them, and the dumb. Finke is talking about worldwide grosses, at which the Harry Potter films excel in particular and in any case benefit from more efficient modern studio global-marketing campaigns. Still, as can be seen in Box Office Mojo’s inflation-corrected list of domestic earnings, all but one of the Star Wars films made more money than the highest-grossing of the Potters, “Sorcerer’s Stone.” (The original “Star Wars” made three times what “Sorcerer’s Stone” did, in fact.) And George Lucas isn’t too bad at worldwide marketing himself. I don’t feel like doing the math, but since two of the 22 James Bond films (”Thunderball” and “Goldfinger”) heavily outgrossed “Sorcerer’s Stone” domestically, I don’t think it’s likely Potter surpasses Bond, either, in real dollars.
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So, Nikki Finke writes that Harry Potter is the highest grossing film franchise ever, and further explains that world-wide, Harry Potter has made $4.47 billion dollars. And you attempt to refute that statement by comparing it to domestic box office earnings. She is talking about worldwide box office gross, guy. Read before you comment, please.
Let me explain it to you in simple terms. A film is often distributed to theaters and people go to this theater and give the theater money in exchange for the opportunity to watch the film. And on occasion, some films are distributed outside of North America and they earn money in the international box office. The combination of the earnings made domestically and internationally creates what they call a world-wide box office gross.
Nikki named Harry Potter the biggest franchise ever and further explained that the Harry Potter franchise has earned more world-wide than any other film franchise. If you were to do some actual research, you might be able to figure out how much some other film franchises made world-wide and adjust the earnings, because the international market has also seen significant increases in ticket prices, then maybe you could present a decent argument.
Another thing. You might want to revamp your website, or something, because it doesn’t look like anyone gives a crap about it. This comment is probably the 100th comment ever, and as such, I should get a prize.
Thanks for taking the time to write! But do me a favor and go back and reread the item.
I carefully made the point that Finke was talking worldwide dollars, and that i was going to cite some domestic ones. (I even helpfully bold-faced the word “domestic” to make it easy!)
The point of the item is that if you convert the previous grosses to inflation-corrected dollars, Potter is at best the third-grossing franchise worldwide. Which means the mark Finke was exclamatorily publicizing wasn’t a record at all.
Where’s my prize??