Dergarabedian studies box office numbers at Hollywood.com. He’s who you call when you want to know what movie data mean. He’s running out of ways to describe Harry Potter and the Massively Bloated Box Office. “To be this relevant? This beloved? I’ve never really seen anything quite like it.”
In the cottage industry of Potter analysis, no superlative is too super, no grandiosity is too grand, no pie in the sky is too high — though over the years, the limits have been tested: Harry Potter saves book sales! Harry Potter saves reading! Harry Potter saves us all!
“It’s hard to pin down causes,” says Sunil Iyenger, the director of research at the National Endowment for the Arts, but there was an increase in adult reading habits between 2002 and 2008. The largest were in the 18-to-24 demographic, precisely the readers who would have been weaned on Harry.
Of course, that time mirrored the rise of e-readers, of Facebook groups and fan fiction portals. Reading became social in ways it never had been before. Books became multi-platformed worlds. Booksellers benefitted from Harry Potter, but Harry benefited from the cross-promotional world (the Boy Who Sold!) into which he was born. People loved “The Lord of the Rings” when the series was released in the 1950s, but it would be decades before they could learn to speak Sindarin at a fan expo.
“We’re so proud,” says Kyle Good, vice president of corporate communications for Scholastic, which publishes the Harry Potter books. “It’s crossed cultures, it’s crossed generations, it’s become embedded in this society. . . . We think every child should read ‘Harry Potter.’ We think it should be a rite of passage.
“My parents read them to us when we were little,” says Carmen Rucker, 17, a high school student in Charlottesville, Va. “Those were the stories we were raised on. I was convinced that I was going to get my Hogwarts letter when I turned 11.” Later, her big sister confessed that she had thought the same thing. Two little girls, waiting for the owls to bring letters announcing their admission to wizard school, and for a magical train to take them there.
What would this generation look like without Harry? Glasses would be less round. No one would parade around in long, striped scarfs. No Muggles. No Britishisms. No hipsterish college students ironically playing Quidditch on the quad.
No vast democratization of bookworminess — the thrilling assertion that books were cool, and so was make-believe, and elves, yes, so were elves.
No patience, maybe. Harry Potter installments have been doled out as slowly as a morphine drip, each one savored and analyzed (let no one who has read an online discussion of J.K Rowling’s copyright fret about the critical thinking skills of today’s youth). One might argue that the most valuable legacy that Harry Potter will leave behind is the gift of anticipation and the ability to wait in line. Potter readers, accustomed to midnight release parties, will grow into adulthood, and suddenly the DMV will become serene.
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