Potter fatigue?

It’s been 10 years since the boy wizard first cast his spell. But now his magic seems to be waning.

On the morning of July 21, 2007, I was standing in line outside Midland Book Shop in Delhi’s Aurobindo Complex, with 20-odd people, all waiting anxiously for their copy of the seventh and the last of the Harry Potter series. Little did I know then that I would be buying one of the 15 million copies of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows sold worldwide that day!

Three years after the release of the book which broke all records to become the fastest selling book in history, its movie adaptation is being screened in multiplexes across the country. Though the book sold over a million copies in India, the run up to the film didn’t quite see a similar fan frenzy. Could it be that over the years, the boy — now teenage — wizard’s magic has waned? It seems so. For starters, the discussion forum on the official Potter website, harrypotter.warnerbros.com doesn’t have as many posts as it did when the fantasy-adventure film based on the sixth book, Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince, was released. In fact, the posts have been consistently falling since the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, came out — from nearly 80,000 then to just a little over 2,000 now. The fans on Facebook also aren’t as bewitched.

Sameer Malik, a second-year student of engineering, who by his own admission is a “Potter-maniac” says while he’s watched all Potter movies on the first day of the release, he’s not looking forward to this one. “I can’t see one part of the movie and wait till the next year to watch the other,” he says. The book has been made into a two-part film and fans like Malik don’t like the feeling of being left hanging. The film’s release has also not had much impact on the sale of the Potter book. “While the sale of books like Twilight and Eat, Pray, Love increased drastically in the week prior to the release of their movies, we’ve seen no such trend for Harry Potter,” says Jimmy Ts, who works at Crosswords Book Store at Delhi’s Select Citywalk Mall. The fact that the film has a ‘parental guidance and supervision’ rating also has some parents concerned.

However, not everything is flying in the wrong direction for the young wizard, whose 10-year-long journey learning spells at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and fighting Death Eaters comes to an end. Udita Vasishth, a senior planner with Universal Mccann, is confident that the “movie will be great”. She’s happy it’s in two parts, which mean “it’s not officially over till next year”. Parama Majumder, a colleague who has a Harry Potter screensaver and a broomstick for a cursor on her computer, agrees, “Splitting the movie into two parts is the only way to do justice to the book.”

After the seventh book, concerns were raised about the success of the remaining movies. These concerns were put to rest when Half-Blood Prince — released last year across 450 screens in the country — was an instant hit. According to Rowling “the best has been saved for last”, but only the response to the new film will tell if Potter has enough magic left to woo the audiences or will they need to be put under the caster’s control with the “Imperius Curse”!

(Manasvi Vohra is an editor at Vikas Publishers)