His Name Is Harry

He is the boy who lived.

In 1997, the world forever changed with the following sentence: Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

The words opened the first novel of J.K. Rowling’s tale of boy wizard Harry Potter, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” released in the U.S. as “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”

“Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” (referencing the original title as it was the first published) spawned a seven-book novel series — which has since become the biggest-selling book series in history — and numerous spinoff product. Worldwide, the series novels have sold over 500 million copies, the eight films based on the “Potter” novels alone (“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the final film, was divided into two parts) have globally grossed over $7.7 billion, and the “Potterverse” franchise in total is worth an estimated $25 billion.

Not bad for a former researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International who conceived the idea for the series while on a delayed train from Manchester to London. From Wikipedia: The seven-year period that followed saw the death of her mother, birth of her first child, divorce from her first husband, and relative poverty until the first novel in the series.

For more information on the creation of “Harry Potter” and the “Potterverse,” please visit the series’ Wikipedia page here:

Perhaps Rowling’s greatest legacy is she is credited with turning countless millions of children and adults back to reading books. A secondary legacy, but no less impressive, is that her novels’ cinematic adaptations were so successful, the studios have — during the films’ releases and since — realized that intellectual property (IP) based on books can be an ongoing mass media bonanza, as opposed to one-off successes.

I

Novel and Film Franchise

(Note: The stories of the films follow the books closely, so I will include the official studio synopsis for each of the films herein. The first book was published by Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom, followed by Scholastic in the U.S., before the remainder of the series was published concurrently by both. In all instances below, I include covers for early versions from each publisher.)

1. “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” (“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” in the U.S.)