Potter, Granger and Weasley, oh my!Audiences across the world joined these three friends for “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” in theaters last week for the largest midnight opening show in history, bringing in around $22 million to the box office.”It completely sold out,” said advertising senior Corey Ikerd, Rave Motion Pictures assistant and marketing manager. “We sold 3,000 tickets. We sold every seat in the building. It was bigger here than last year with the ‘Dark Knight,’ which was explosive for us.”Ikerd said the theater has 3,200 seats in all.Ikerd said the midnight opening of the sixth Harry Potter movie brought in so much business that the compressors for the soft drink machines broke, and they could no longer serve soft drinks.Brian Rutherford, Rave Motion Pictures manager, said the theater sold 2,300 seats on Friday, 2,500 seats on Saturday and 1,800 seats on Sunday. He said there is usually a 45 to 50 percent drop in seats sold between the first and second weekend for a movie such as Harry Potter.”It’s interesting that a series of books is so immensely popular that students, kids and adults read it,” said June Pulliam, English instructor at the University. “That’s such an uncommon thing in our culture right now. You have adults [in the theaters] who aren’t just accompanying children. The adults seem to be about as serious as children are.”The first book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” was published in the U.S. in 1998. Harry, the protagonist of the entire book series and movie franchise, is only 11 years old in the first book, as were many of his fans when they picked up the book for the first time.”I was the same age as [Harry] was when [the first book] came out,” said Ikerd. “It’s a character that, as a child, you can watch grow up. He grew up with me. I think people are attached to Harry Potter more than any other character.”Ikerd said the sixth film is his second favorite behind the third movie, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”Mary Dean, medical physics senior, said she has read all seven books of the series, and that the sixth movie bothered her because they left a lot of the original plot out of the movie.Even though some are critics of the movies, others have loved them all.”I think we’re in an age where people are interested in super-natural, super-human, spiritual, christian-god, new-age [things],” said Maurice Swinney, of Gonzales, La. “Everybody is trying to tap into this power source that nobody really understands, and everybody has this sense of urgency to learn more about. And so when you have an easy book like ‘Harry Potter’ that reads well [and] allows the mind to create vivid images, it’s just one of those pieces that … people can easily tap into.”
To see a video of fans reaction to the sixth Potter film, click here.—–Contact Mary Walker Baus at [email protected]