Radcliffe
SHANGHAI -- "Ha-li Bo Te" mania has hit the Chinese mainland.
"Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" hit China's cinemas last week and is working unprecedented magic at local wickets. Shanghai Film Art Center, where the film premiered Jan. 26, reported that all of its first-night tickets sold out a week before, and it's still filling around 70% of seats. Warner Bros. is projecting that the pic grossed $2 million on 200 prints over the first five days of official release (Jan. 30-Feb. 3), an impressive sum for a foreign movie in China.
American distributors typically repatriate only 10%-15% of total grosses in China: "Titanic," for example, returned only an estimated $6.5 million to Fox and Paramount out of a total estimated $43 million gross on the mainland.
"These are excellent figures for us, especially at this time of year," Chen Qingyi, the Film Art Center's director of marketing, said of "Harry's" debut. "It's doing as well as 'Pearl Harbor' did last year, and this time of year is normally slow for Chinese cinemas."
The weeks preceding the Chinese New Year (Feb. 12-15) are notoriously slow for the Chinese B.O., with audiences holding out for the holidays.
Chen predicts the pic may be playing to a full house once kids break for vacation, and that "Ha-Li Bo Te" may play into March, an extraordinary run for a foreign film.
Warner Bros. broke the mold in getting its film in cinemas over the holiday period, which is normally reserved for domestic movies.
"The most important factor in the film's success here," Chen Qingyi insisted, "is the speed at which it came out -- just two months after the U.S. release."
Pirated VCDs and DVDs of the film appeared on the streets before the end of 2001, but Chen reckons that much of the audience held out for the bigscreen experience.
"We've also been surprised by the number of adults coming to watch the film on their own," said Crystal Chu, a marketing exec at the Golden Cinemas multiplex.
The success of the "Harry Potter" books -- which went on sale across the country last October -- also worked in the film's favor.
Wang Ruiqin, chief editor of the People's Literature Publishing House, which translated and published J.K. Rowling's works, said the "Harry Potter" novels are now the bestselling children's books in Chinese history. The series is now in its 11th printing, with 3 million copies sold.
The timing of the "Harry" release may also work in favor of "The Lord of the Rings," from WB sibling New Line, which is set to open here soon. Translations of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic appeared in Shanghai bookstores last November.
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