Harry Potter: new featurettes, ticket sales soar

Simon Brew

Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince ticket sales outpace Transformers 2, as Warner Bros offers two more behind the scenes featurettes…

Published on Jul 7, 2009

With a week to go until the unveiling of the last huge blockbuster movie of the season, Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, we're about to find out if Warner Bros was playing a savvy game by delaying the film's release.

The early word on ticket sales suggests that it might have been. There's thinking that, if you want to maximise your revenues, releasing in the summer is more lucrative than the Christmas season (with exceptions such as the Lord Of The Rings trilogy and Titanic, of course), but more significantly, Warner has the family market pretty much to itself at the moment. Pixar's Up has had a long run, Ice Age 3 hasn't quite done the numbers Fox was expecting, and without a major blockbuster to threaten it in the weeks ahead, we could yet be looking at the most lucrative Potter film to date.

Certainly the advance ticket news in the US is positive. According to ticket agents Fandango, Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince is the fastest selling film of the year, outpacing even Transformers 2, which has now broken the $300m mark in the US in less than half a month.

Will Potter's opening next Wednesday break Transformers' haul? Our guess is not quite, and that the summer will be won, in terms of sheer take, by Michael Bay's juggernaut. But Half-Blood Prince isn't going to be very far behind. It helps that it's getting some quite ecstatic reviews, including our own.

To keep the proverbial appetite whetted, the Warner Bros publicity machine has spat out another pair of featurettes that we feel honour bound to bring to you. We're wagering that it's given us most of the content of the DVD extras package by now, and you can see the latest two behind-the-scenes pieces by clicking below.

Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince is (finally) released on Wednesday 15th July.