| Mirror
Magazine |
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The battle Hundreds of
young movie fans flocked to Leicester Square in London to see their
favourite stars arriving for the first official screening of the
second Harry Potter movie, demonstrating the enduring popularity
of J. K. Rowling's characters. Dressed in
wizard hats and wearing Harry Potter scarves, the crowd screamed
and chanted as they waited for the celebrity guests to turn up.
Some had queued for several hours, braving rain earlier in the day
in the hope of getting autographs from the film's cast. When she arrived
at the screening, Rowling expressed surprise at the intensity of
the welcome. "I'm a bit wet, a bit amazed, I didn't think it
would be this mad again," she said. The premiere
was a carefully orchestrated event by the film's backers, who are
determined to beat off the challenge of the second Lord of the Rings
film, The Two Towers, which is due for release on December 18. At stake is
a worldwide market worth a fortune in box office receipts, merchandising
spin-offs and DVD and video sales. In round one,
Frodo and Co. were the clear winners with the critics, scooping
four Oscars and five Baftas to Potter's none. But when it
came to box office takings, the bespectacled schoolboy wizard soared.
So far, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone has earned Warner
Bros £619 million - making it the second-highest earning film
ever made behind the Titanic. The first Lord
of the Rings film, Fellowship of the Ring, had to settle for £554
million. With potentially
even more money at stake in round two of the fantasy rivalry, the
studios are determined to ensure they win the festive marketing
battle, which for the first time has supplanted summer as the most
lucrative period for film studios. Screen International
magazine said: "With the two biggest hits of 2001 coming in
the last six weeks of the year, winter has been declared the new
summer." Harry Potter
and the Chamber of Secrets, which sees Harry confronting a sinister
force terrorising Hogwarts, is thought to have an advantage with
a November 15 general release date. Tickets have
been on sale since September to generate advance bookings. Advance
bookings for the Tolkien sequel are also expected to start soon.
However, experts
point out that the five-week gap between the openings is a deliberate
strategy to maximise the box-office impact of both films. Although they
will be competing, the studios behind them are not rivals at all
- Warner Bros, which makes the Potter films, and New Line Cinema,
behind Rings, are both part of AOL Time Warner. Regardless of success in this battle, both movies are likely to make huge profits, with Harry Potter, for example, costing £100 million to produce and market. Including lucrative licensing tie-ins, it is likely to make at least 10 times this amount. Harry
Potter: Back with changes It's a fair
question to ask, given the vast physical changes to the principal
child actors since the premiere of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's
Stone a year ago. "Puberty
has taken a frightening toll," observed The Independent's reviewer
John Walsh. "Harry and Ron now speak in a gravelly baritone
they didn't have before. "Some of the early scenes, involving
half a dozen of the lanky adolescents, suggest not a class of schoolboys,
but some form of government-sponsored youth training scheme."
The Harry Potter
film formula did not yet include sex, he said. But that might be
just a matter of time. "My voice
has broken and I've grown three inches," said Daniel Radcliffe,
who plays the title role. The growth
of the child actors seems to be entirely consistent with the formula
for the new movie. Running to
almost three hours (frightfully long for most pre-pubescent Potter
fans), the Chamber of Secrets is said to be faster, scarier and
louder than the first movie. The quidditch scenes (breathtaking
in the first movie) are more action-packed and the bad guys are
worse than ever. The film's
makers and Harry Potter's creator, author J. K. Rowling, have dedicated
the film to Richard Harris, who plays the wise Professor Dumbledore
and who died last month. His fellow
countryman, Kenneth Branagh, who plays an egomaniac eccentric Gilderoy
Lockhart, tutor in defence against the dark arts, is said to steal
the show. The Independent
noted that Branagh's Lockhart is a "preening, bouffanted fake". "Mr. Branagh
may be sending up his own persona here; or someone is playing a
cruel joke," it said. The Guardian
praised the film for once again largely sticking to Rowling's book,
but it wondered how long the Harry Potter series would continue
to cast its spell. "Children
and adults around the country, breathe easy - the magic of Harry
Potter is as potent as ever in film ... the Chamber of Secrets is
darker, funnier and finer than its forerunner ... Although one wonders
whether, unlike the books, the spell will remain so strong over
a possible further five films," the paper's Lizzie Rusbridger
writes. She said that
with the exception of the "sickeningly cheesy Hollywood ending,"
the "plot sticks like glue" to Rowling's second book. Rowling herself
is probably the film's biggest winner. She has just finished the
fifth book in the Potter series and the market awaits it with anticipation. "I didn't
think it would ever be this mad," the author said as she walked
through a sea of fans, dressed as witches, in Leicester Square.
"When
I wrote the book it would have been insane for me to imagine all
this." Rowling has
also undergone some physical changes since the last premiere; she
is now pregnant with the child of her new husband, Neil Murray. The
challenges That's what
happened to young Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint, who are back
on our screens as Harry Potter and his pal Ron Weasley in Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the second in the blockbuster
series of adventures about the junior wizards at Hogwart's Academy. A couple of
Daniel's favourite scenes included the duelling scene between Snape
and Gilderoy Lockhart (played by Belfast-born Kenneth Branagh) and
the challenge of the Parseltongue scene: "It was in a completely
different language because I had to speak to the snakes. It was
hard to get a hold on at first, but I got used to it in the end." For Rupert
it was the slug scene: "That was brilliant. They actually tasted
really nice because they were all different flavours ... orange,
lemon, peppermint and chocolate!" The two - and
co-star Emma Watson, who plays Hermione - are determined to continue
playing their characters in future H.P. films, in spite of them
even now looking more grown up than in the first Philosopher's Stone.
Daniel, for instance, reckons he could make it through until the
fifth film. In the Chamber
of Secrets, the trio are involved in more magical adventures that
will captivate audiences. This film,
says director Chris Columbus, who himself is stepping down from
behind the cameras, is grittier, tougher and leaner since he had
learned a lot making the first one: "What I found from the
first film allowed me to use more visual freedom the second time
around. We are still sticking strictly to J.K. Rowling's ethos,
we're not turning the world upside down ... but I now know and understand
visual effects better." Daniel also
loved all the action scenes and in several of them he did all his
own stunts: "In the scene when I'm hanging out of the car window,
that was actually me. I was dangling 25-30 feet in the air ... of
course, there are some stunts they won't let me do!" |
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