What a difference a year makes.
At this time last year, movie audiences were looking ahead to a holiday season dominated by Harry Potter and The Lord Of The Rings. This year, they are looking forward to one dominated by Harry Potter and The Lord Of The Rings.
On the surface, it’s deja vu. But there are significant differences this time as the films square off. The Harry Potter series is moving into darker territory to attract a slightly older, teenage audience, and there is speculation in Hollywood that the Lord Of The Rings series will supplant Harry Potter as the season’s box-office champion in The United States like it did in Canada the first time around.
While the two movie series feature wizards and elves and other fantasy elements, they are really quite different and have appealed to different audiences. The first Harry Potter was a classic family film, drawing children and their parents, as well as enough from other demographic groups to create a hit. The Fellowship Of The Ring, the first in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, was an action epic that played most strongly to males in their teens and 20s.
Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, the first instalment in what Warner Brothers hopes will be a multi-film franchise drawing cash into many AOL Time Warner divisions for years to come, made $318 million (U.S.) in North American theatres after opening last November.
The Fellowship Of The Ring — an expensive gamble on which executives at New Line Cinema, also part of AOL Time Warner, practically staked the future of the studio — was more of a question mark before its opening. But the film was a box-office and a critical triumph, making $313 million (U.S.) in North American theatres and earning 14 Oscar nominations.
In Canada, however, Lord Of The Rings, distributed by Alliance/Atlantis, earned about $53 million (Can.) at the box office, which was slightly more than Harry Potter, according to figures released earlier this year. Final Canadian figures were not available yesterday.
This year, the best guess from Wall Street analysts, professional box-office watchers and Hollywood executives — inside and outside the two studios — is that Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets (opening Nov. 15) and The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers (Dec. 18) will probably dominate the holiday season, perhaps taking in $600 million between them in North America, and twice that amount overseas.
Warner Brothers executives say their research shows that anticipation for the second Harry Potter film is just as high as it was for the first and carries to all ages.
“You just have to look at all the buzz around when J.K. Rowling will release the upcoming fifth book in the series and you can see that interest in the series is as intense as ever,” said Dawn Taubin, the president of domestic marketing at Warner Brothers. The next book, Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, is expected next year.
If the experience of California-based movie ticket service Fandango Inc. is any indication, the boy wizard already has a head start. Fandango took the unprecedented step of starting advance ticket sales a full month before the film’s Nov. 15 release date, and Potter is already proving to be more popular with customers than current hits Red Dragon and Sweet Home Alabama. It accounted for 21 per cent of all tickets purchased through Fandango last weekend.
Whether the second Harry Potter does as well as the first — which had a $90-million opening weekend — will depend on many factors, including competition from family-oriented films like Santa Clause 2 (opening Nov. 1), Treasure Planet (Nov. 27) and The Wild Thornberrys (Dec. 20).
“I think certainly the issues for Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings are different than they were a year ago,” said Russell Schwartz, New Line’s president of domestic marketing. “Last year, it was all about Harry Potter being the 800-pound gorilla, and it certainly delivered like that at the box office, if not with the critics. With Lord Of The Rings, no one really knew what to expect, so we had the great element of surprise and a kind of wow factor. This year, we both have to live up to what we did last year.”
The Lord Of The Rings’ success in Canada followed a heavy promotional campaign by AllianceAtlantis, including a well-attended pre-opening exhibit of costumes and scenery at Casa Loma. A larger exhibit is planned for The Two Towers, beginning Nov. 1 at the Royal Ontario Museum’s planetarium annex.
On Wall Street and among merchandisers, opinions differ about which film will end up on top, though there is unanimity that Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter will each rank among the two biggest hits. Other potential holiday hits include Die Another Day, a James Bond movie; sequels like Star Trek: Nemesis and Analyze That; and unknowns like Catch Me If You Can, a Steven Spielberg film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks. They are expected to do well, though not as well as Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings.
Warner Brothers executives also point to differences between the first Harry Potter film and the second — differences that should be apparent to anyone studying the posters and billboards. The young heroes in the posters look older, tougher and a little more determined. The one featuring Daniel Radcliffe as Harry shows him grimly wielding a gleaming sword covered in archaic runes, an image that seems borrowed from The Lord Of The Rings and calculated to appeal to that trilogy’s older demographic.
“The campaign is a bit edgier, a bit darker,” Taubin said, in keeping with the more action-packed nature of the second instalment.
And while Warner Brothers acknowledged that its family film will not deliver the violent thrills that might appeal to an older action audience, it says it hopes that more viewers, from age 12 to 16, might be lured to theatres.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” said Diane Henry, who manages the Harry Potter brand for Warner Brothers.
