Hundreds of devoted fans are already camped out ahead of last night’s world premiere of the second part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when the credits were to finally begin to roll on the most lucrative franchises the film industry has ever seen.
Cast and crew, including the three stars, will parade from Trafalgar Square via a pop-up Diagon Alley (the wizarding world’s high street) to the Odeon cinema in nearby Leicester Square in one of the most lavish send-offs in cinema history.
Some fans have been there since Monday.
Photo: EPA
“I’ve grown up in the Harry Potter generation, it’s a limbo state after this,” said Rhyss Bowen Jones, 18, who traveled from Wales. “I read the first book when I was five, so now it’s weird that it’s coming to an end, like the end of childhood.”
It’s been billed as the biggest film of the northern summer, but this last hurrah is as upsetting a prospect for the British film industry as it is for the teenagers who have grown up with Harry, Ron, Hermione and co.
Since 2001’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the films have generated more than US$6 billion in global revenue, not including DVDs, turning the Leavesden studios in Hertfordshire, north of London, into a worldwide concern and leading to a US$160 million investment by franchise owner Warner Bros. The books have sold more than 400 million copies. But while author JK Rowling can keep her cash flow stable through Pottermore (the recently unveiled Website of unpublished material on the world of Potter), Warner has been plowing cash into alternative franchises, even ones such as the poorly received superhero outing, The Green Lantern.
For the studio, all but insulated from many of the financial problems that have hit competitors (such as the declining DVD market), the impulse to milk the final installment (the last book was split into two films) is understandable. However, the actors are contemplating life post-Potter. None has any wish to go down with the ship.
Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry, and whose bank balance is estimated at ￡48 million (US$76.7 million), has cut the apron strings: He is starring on Broadway in the farce How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and did a successful turn in Equus.
“If I can make a career for myself after Potter, and it goes well, and is varied and with longevity, then that puts to bed the ‘child actors argument,’” he told GQ magazine. “If I can do it, in the biggest film franchise of all time, no other child actor who comes after will ever have to answer those same bloody questions.”
As the curtain comes down on the series, Radcliffe, 21, said he hoped it was not the end of the friendship between the co-stars.
“Myself, Rupert and Emma have spent 10 years with each other ... I do think the bond is pretty unbreakable,” he said in New York on Wednesday. “Hopefully, we’ll work together again.”
Watson, also 21, said: “Hermione has been like my sister and I’ll actually miss being her.
“Hermione is such an incredible young woman. She made me a better person,” she said.
Early word suggests that the end of the series, whose quality has sometimes stuttered through the long haul, has also provided with a last gasp of life. But not immortality.
“You knew how it would end all along,” says Alan Rickman’s Severus Snape to Harry in the closing moments of this multibillion-dollar swan song.
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