By the time you read this column, second weekend tallies for the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone movie will, in all likelihood, have set new attendance records, especially since it coincides with the four-day Thanksgiving weekend. This is an easy prediction, considering that the first weekend tallies (Nov. 16—18) for the Warner Bros. film broke all former records with $90.3 million in ticket sales. The mass market movie tie-in edition was the #1 paperback bestseller last week (PW's weekly mass market list does not include children's books). To date, worldwide sales of J.K. Rowling's four novels (in hardcover and paperback) have topped 120 million copies; stateside, the in-print figure for the books has surpassed 50 million copies.
All this bodes well for the other movie for which fans are waiting with great anticipation—J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Its opening day is December 19 (in 10,000 theaters internationally), and it may be the prime candidate to upset that new Potter record. According to New Line, back in April 2000, its first teaser movie trailer ad was downloaded by 1.7 million people in 24 hours. The Ballantine mass market movie tie-in edition, The Fellowship of the Ring, is the #1 mass market on PW's list this week. Another harbinger of keen interest is that Houghton Mifflin's The Lord of the Rings Official Movie Guide by Brian Sibley is climbing the national bestseller charts (it was #13 on the New York Times nonfiction paperback list November 25); total in print for the trade paperback is 410,000 copies.
With reporting by Dick Donahue
