Harry Potter is Still the King

Trends come and go, and lately it might seem like the Harry Potter phenomenon has been usurped by the latest craze: The Twilight Saga.  And yet, if you look at the numbers, it doesn’t add up: Harry still wins.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon opened this past December to a record-breaking $143 million opening in North America.  But fifteen weeks later, it has managed to climb to $296 million — a few notches less than Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’s $302 million total.  By the time New Moon finally leaves theaters when the DVD and Blu-Ray come out on March 20th, it will have reached around $297-298 million.

Now naturally, Twilight should be applauded for capturing the hearts and imaginations of women around the world, and a gross just shy of $300 million is a wild success by any measure.

But the aging Harry Potter franchise still managed to beat it.  (Worldwide grosses are even more pronounced: Harry Potter made $934 million versus New Moon’s $706 million.)  Now we’ll just have to see how The Twilight Saga: Eclipse performs versus Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Part I in this coming year.

Daniel Radcliffe Won’t Be a ‘Lucky One’

The normally-reliable Slashfilm recently published a hunch that Daniel Radcliffe and actress Lily Rabe would be starring in a big-screen adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’s novel The Lucky One.

Unfortunately, it didn’t pan out, but there might be some truth in it.  The news came from a couple of tweets from producer Christine Vachon, who revealed that she attended a script reading with Radcliffe, Rabe, and director Douglas McGrath.  She didn’t reveal the name of the movie.  So if it’s not The Lucky One, what is it?

MTV suggests it might be Nothing Else Like it on Earth, a story about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.  Sigourney Weaver and Nathan Lane have also been attached to the project.

Still, there have been no confirmations, and the fact is, a script reading doesn’t mean you’re actually involved in the movie.  A lot of times, script readings are done as favors, or just to check out a story and find out how well it plays when you have actors speaking the lines out loud.

But stay tuned.  Whether or not Radcliffe ends up in this movie, it sounds more and more like he’ll have an interesting post-Harry Potter career.

Helena Bonham Carter Had Fun Playing Hermione

Wait, what?

In the Harry Potter franchise, Helena Bonham Carter plays Bellatrix Lestrange, of course.  But if you’ll remember, there’s a scene in Deathly Hallows — the one where they break into Gringotts — in which Hermione takes some polyjuice potion in order to transform into Bellatrix.  Naturally, Emma Watson wouldn’t be filming those scenes — Carter would.

The actress told MTV recently that the scenes were great fun to film:

“The best bit about being Bellatrix in this one is also because I got to pretend to be Hermione,” she added of a pivotal scene that has the evil witch’s identity being assumed by Harry’s friend in order to gain access to Gringotts Wizarding Bank, which holds Hufflepuff’s cup — and a part of Voldemort’s soul. “Because Hermione takes polyjuice potion and gets to look like Bellatrix.”…

“It was great fun,” she said of the scene. “[I was] looking at Dan [Radcliffe] and Rupert [Grint] and they were treating me as if I was 17.”

Carter also reveals that all of her scenes take place in Part II of Deathly Hallows — which is a pretty big clue in terms of where they’re going to split the book up.  The scene in which she tortures Hermione happens around the midpoint of the book, but it’ll be in the second film.

Harry Potter Matchmaking: Bonnie Wright and Jamie Campbell Bower

The Harry Potter movie machine has been chugging along for ten years now, and has employed thousands of people.  A fair number of romances have assuredly sprung up over the course of the past decade as a direct result of shared Potter employment — yet probably none quite as adorable as Bonnie Wright and Jamie Campbell Bower.

Wright officially met Bower at a party, but the two both appear in Deathly Hallows — Wright as Ginny, of course, and Bower as Grindelwald, the wizard from Dumbledore’s past.  (Bower also appears in The Twilight Saga as the Volturi’s Caius.)

The two have been dating for six months but officially came out as a couple at this year’s BAFTA awards.  Ginny and Grindelwald — now there’s an odd couple for you.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 3D?

Not sure how I feel about this, but apparently Warner Bros. is giving the go-ahead on turning Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, both parts, into 3D.

Apparently the conversion cost is only $5 million, plus another $5 million in expenses for 3D glasses and such, which the studio assumes it will easily be able to make back in added revenue.

It’s hard to deny that 3D movies currently tend to make more money, especially when Avatar is still raking in millions, about to breakthrough Titanic’s record $600 million gross.  But is 3D right for Harry Potter?  The series doesn’t take place on an alien world, it takes place in England, and Deathly Hallows Part 1 in particular takes place largely in the woods.

Hopefully it won’t hurt the movies…it just feels unnecessary.  But hey, studios are in the business of making money.

First Photo of the Wizarding World’s Hogwarts!

We’ve seen videos and concept art in preparation of Universal Orlando’s The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park, but here’s the first photo of what Hogwarts Castle will look like.  Very, very cool!

Half-Blood Prince Score Loses Out on Grammy

The 2010 Grammy Awards are being held tonight, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’s Nicholas Hooper was nominated for Best Score Soundtrack Album.

Unfortunately, he lost the award to Michael Giacchino’s sad and sweet score for Up.

Also nominated was Alexandre Desplat for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and by coincidence, Desplat was just hired to score Deathly Hallows, Part 1.

Radcliffe Talks Filming Deathly Hallows

Speaking briefly to the Daily Record, Daniel Radcliffe talked a bit about what it was like to shoot the first edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

“We were only in Scotland for one night to do the camping scenes but it was magic,” he revealed. “The mountains up there looked kind of blue and and the weather was great.”

Radcliffe explained that fans might be surprised by Deathly Hallows, which has been split into two films.

“Part one is a road movie,” he said. “We are not in Hogwarts at all and it’s going to look very different. And the action is going to be pretty extraordinary.”

Not surprising to readers of the book, but still, a pretty big step for the series as a whole.  I think audiences who aren’t familiar with the story will be very surprised.  Hopefully in a good way.

Alexandre Desplat to Compose Deathly Hallows, Part 1

According to Film Score Monthly (via Filmonic), composer Alexandre Desplat has been hired on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1.

Desplat most recently composed the score for The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and was nominated for Oscars for his work on the films The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Queen.  He takes over for Nicholas Hooper, who did the previous two Potter flicks.

John Williams, of course, started off the franchise and created that familiar theme, and with Desplat only being hired for the first Deathly Hallows, it’s still possible Williams could return.

Much Ado Over Possible Daniel Radcliffe Nakedness

Last month we ran a story that featured a quote from director David Yates telling VideoBusiness.com that there’ll be a scene in Deathly Hallows in which Ron will see a Horcrux-induced “nightmarish vision” of Harry making out with Hermione while “bare.”

Additionally, La Vibra later ran a story in which Yates apparently told them, “there is another scene in Kings Cross station, where Harry almost dies and sees Dumbledore. In that scene he will also be naked.”

Neither of these two scenes should be particularly surprising to anybody who read the book.  Yep, Ron was subconsciously worried about Harry and Hermione, and yep, Harry was naked during his afterlife scene with Dumbledore.  But a lot of people wrote articles about it, enough for the anti-gossip blog Gossip Cop (a really obnoxious site, by the way) to write a story debunking the rumors:

One thing we can guarantee is that filmmakers plan to “present” any scenes of Radcliffe in a way no different than any other ‘PG’ fare. Audiences may see the actor in various states of undress – but claims he’ll “bare all,” as OK! reports, weren’t true a month ago… and they aren’t true now.

Uh, I don’t think anybody was expecting full frontal.  These are Harry Potter movies.  Doesn’t change the fact that the character might still be naked in those scenes.