As you might expect, with the penultimate Harry Potter film due at the end of next week, there have been a slew of HP-related articles covering all sorts of topics, from retrospectives to cast interviews. The Guardian has also taken a look at what Harry Potter has provided in cold, hard cash for the British film industry.
While a lot of the series was filmed here and Warner Bros., the studio who produce the films, are buying facilities here, partly to put a Potter-based exhibit on it (which I hadn’t seen mention of before), I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if a UK company had produced the films.
Sure, Warner Bros. have pumped a lot of money into the UK while shooting the films, but (assuming these numbers are correct) the total budget for the films was less than $1 billion, of which the UK would would have received only a percentage. By comparison they are said to have grossed $5.4 billion (and this is just box office, nothing on merchandising or DVD sales). All of those profits go back to the US.
If we’d financed and made them here whoever made them could bought the entire UK film industry with change. The £100 million for Warners suddenly looks like chicken feed.
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