HP does not better in the summer than Fall

[Carol]

Red wrote:
>
> Hi Carol I couldn't have said it any better - I don't know if this will help but i looked aroudn for Harry Potter Profit sales http://www.swivel.com/data_sets/columns/1007158
> Love,Red -  (Who is enjoying the debate) 

Carol responds:

Thanks for the compliment and the chart. It doesn't cover all of GoF or any of OOP, but if you click on "Show whole table," it does give us a bit of new information: the number of weeks the first three films stayed in the box office.

SS/PS, 27
CoS, 22
PoA, 24

If we compare profits for all three films at 22 weeks, we have

SS/PS $317,048,532
CoS $261,970,615 
PoA $246,266,986

After 24 weeks, PoA was nowhere near SS/PS ($249,358,727 contrasted with $317,347,879). That amount was close to what SS/PS had earned after only four and a half weeks (fourth week, $239,659,542; fifth week, $253,269,579). By comparison, CoS earned approximately that amount between the seventh and eighth weeks ($240,307,533 and  $252,097,945, respectively).  

What's really interesting is that PoA started off *ahead* of both SS/PS and CoS, possibly thanks to an intriguing and well publicized trailer easily watchable on the Internet. (Anyone know whether SS/PS and CoS also had Internet trailers?)

For the first week, we have 

SS/PS $90,294,621
CoS $88,357,488
PoA $93,687,367

(GoF was already at an astounding $102,335,066 for the first week, but since the data for it go only until the sixth week, when it was still way ahead of PoA and CoS but falling slightly behind SS/PS, I'm ignoring it here.)

But SS/PS more than doubled its profits by the second week, reaching $186,978,513, at which point it was probably impossible to match it. 

In the second week, PoA was still ahead of CoS, with $157,975,042 compared with 148,358,831, but in the third week, it fell behind, with   $190,925,253.00 compared to CoS's $200,159,012. For the next few weeks, the profits were very close, but by the ninth week, PoA was stuck in the 240 million-dollar range and never got out. CoS had passed PoA's high point by the eighth week and SS/PS by the fifth. 

I have no idea how these figures compare to those for other blockbuster films, but I'm surprised that CoS didn't run a little longer and that PoA ran 24 weeks. Maybe the theaters (or whoever decides these things) kept hoping it would catch up to CoS (obviously SS/PS was unbeatable by that point.)

Anyway, I hope I'm not boring anyone. I'm not normally interested in statistics, but these are revealing. "What a falling off was there" for PoA. The chart shows us clearly when, but the question still remains: why? Why did the profits for PoA start off higher even than SS/PS but fall behind CoS and stay there? And why did profits soar again for GoF even though PoA had been a *relative* flop? Had the fanbase grown that much in a year and a half?

(BTW, could PoA really have *lost* ten dollars between the ninth and tenth weeks or is that an error in the data?)

Carol, guessing that diehard book fans were disappointed in PoA--and possibly parents thought it was too dark for younger kids--but wouldn't the darker elements apply to GoF, too (???)