Friday it comes, the final detonation of the cultural blast that left millions of foreheads metaphorically imprinted with lightning-shaped scars. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” is the final installment of the leviathan eight-film series based on J.K. Rowling’s monumental best-selling novels.
Since 2001, the Potter movies have been both a middlebrow juggernaut and an employment program for all of Britain’s aging character actors, from Maggie Smith to Alan Rickman. The books have become almost holy.
It is a franchise that became a movement. A cultural revelation. An era. Friday’s opening is the last chapter in a saga that has impacted — at least via “SNL” spoofs mentions on university syllabuses or in religious sermons — the world’s collective oversoul.
“What has Harry Potter meant?” asks Emerson Sparks, who founded the impeccable fan site MuggleNet.com as a home-schooled 12-year-old more than a decade ago. “What is the meaning of life?”
Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, the vanquisher of the evil Lord Voldemort and, more importantly, the instiller of virtues like self-sacrifice and patience. His 1997 appearance on bookshelves enthralled a generation of readers and then schooled them, semester by semester with Harry & Co. at Hogwarts. His adventures were penned by a single mom whose own success story was an adult fairy tale: She got lucky, got famous, got really attractive and got richer than almost everyone but Oprah.
Harry Potter keeps ending. There were stories about the end when Rowling finished the last book in early 2007, when her readers read the last book in mid-2007, when the last movie finished filming in 2010, and now . . . now what?
Now the numerical analysis begins, because non-fans often confuse what Harry Potter meant with what Harry Potter cost. It cost cape-wearing moviegoers more than $6 billion in worldwide ticket sales — a third more than all 22 James Bond movies combined. It cost readers the equivalent of 450 million copies, compared to roughly 80 million for the beloved “Chronicles of Narnia.” It cost around $80 a ticket for each visitor who has stormed Orlando’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park since it opened last year, where fans purchased a total of 2 million Butterbeers. It costs $46.99 to buy a skimpy wizard costume in Gryffindor colors on BuyCostume.com.
Brand-value-wise, says Susan Gunelius, who wrote “Harry Potter: The Story of a Global Business Phenomenon,” Harry has been valued higher than Levi’s, higher than Lexus, higher than Starbucks.
Despite the proliferation of stuff, it is not about the stuff.
Harry Potter manufactured a decade in which nearly everyone could share one cultural reference point. Be it through mocking or devotion, everyone knew what it was, which was rare in a fractured age of 500 cable channel options.
“It’s big. It’s huge. It’s going to be so huge. It’s the end of an era. I’m so excited, I’m going to die.” Paul Dergarabedian sighs. “I don’t know what I can say anymore.”
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