How the $10 billion success of ‘Harry Potter’ left behind a trail of devastation on cinema
If one movie finds huge success, then it’s inevitable a slew of thinly-veiled imitators will follow in its wake. That proved to be the case when Harry Potter evolved from a literary juggernaut into a cultural one, but despite being immensely profitable, it gave rise to a trend that left a trail of financial destruction in its wake.
Thanks to the one-two punch of Philosopher’s Stone and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring releasing in 2001 and hoovering up a combined box office haul that came within touching distance of $2billion, it was decreed in Hollywood’s corridors of power that every single book series with a fantasy element needed to be brought to the screen as soon as possible.
While the Potter brand has taken several dings in recent years thanks to creator J.K. Rowling’s repeated online outbursts, the money-grubbing financial decision to spin Fantastic Beasts – a slim fictional textbook written to raise money for charity – into a five-film saga that’s got no chance of making it to the finish line. The episodic streaming reboot nobody was asking for, the Wizarding World’s $9.7billion in ticket sales was hugely detrimental to the bottom line of virtually every major studio and production company.
There are outliers, of course, with The Hunger Games and The Twilight Saga proving to be just fine in the long run, and the same can be said of The Maze Runner to a lesser extent. However, examining the laundry list of literary titles announced as the start of a potentially lucrative film series only to fall flat at the very first hurdle is somewhere between galling and damning.
The Divergent Series did at least make it 75% of the way through its planned four-movie arc, only for the law of diminishing returns to cause the final chapter to be abandoned completely. The same can be said of The Chronicles of Narnia, which moved from Disney to Fox and still ended up being jettisoned three features in, although Greta Gerwig is in the midst of mounting a reboot for Netflix.
The Golden Compass may have won an Academy Award for its visual effects, but it ended up losing so much money that it effectively signed the death warrant for New Line Cinema, and was subsequently rebooted as a TV series.
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, Beautiful Creatures, Vampire Academy, and Stormbreaker were all adaptations of the first book in a popular series, and every single one of them failed to recoup their production costs from cinemas. Seventh Son sat on the shelf for two years and ended up losing $85 million to obliterate any hope of seeing Joseph Delaney’s The Wardstone Chronicles follow in the footsteps of Harry Potter.
Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time ended up $130 million in the red to extinguish any thoughts of author Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet becoming a viable enterprise, while not even the combined might of J.R.R. Tolkien dream team Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillipa Boyens could prevent Mortal Engines from haemorrhaging an estimated $175million before it slinked away from cinemas with its head hanging in shame.
The Host hailed from Twilight author Stephenie Meyer and imploded upon its debut, while The Giver took the exact same path despite boasting Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, and Taylor Swift among its ensemble. Artemis Fowl was declared so dead on arrival that Disney pulled it from cinemas, sent it straight to streaming, and then removed it from the Disney+ library altogether as part of a content purge, with the Mouse House at least seeking to atone for the mistakes made by the Percy Jackson duology by rebooting 20th Century Fox’s failed franchise as an episodic series.
Chaos Walking underwent extensive rewrites, reshoots, and changes in key personnel before dying a slow and painful death among the cinemagoing public two years behind schedule, and that’s to say nothing of fellow one-and-done efforts including The 5th Wave, Inkheart, I Am Number Four, and Mortal Instruments: City of Bones to name just a small sample size.
Adding up the cumulative failures paints the stark picture of most attempts at leaping on the Harry Potter bandwagon, yielding billions of dollars in financial losses. However, the industry bone-headedly persevered nonetheless because Katniss Everdeen and Bella Swan made it work. With that kind of money on the line and barely any results to show for it, the fad should have been abandoned a great deal sooner.
