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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