The Harry Potter series, already considered a force for publishing, film and children's reading habits, may have rung up another breakthrough: online movie-ticket sales.
Fandango Inc., the largest remote movie-ticketing company in the United States, reported yesterday that it sold 700,000 tickets over the Internet for the opening weekend of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, an estimated 5 percent of the total box office. Fandango sales exceeded $4.5 million for Potter last weekend, the company reported. At its peak, Fandango said, it was selling more than four tickets a second.
Internet purchases of movie tickets remain a tiny fraction of the box office, but industry analysts say that the Potter and Lord of the Rings films are making inroads for the online services. The films are major attractions for family audiences, with adult buyers loathe to get shut out and disappoint kids. Most online brokers charge an extra $1 per ticket.
"It's usually an event that causes people to change behavior," said Geri Spieler of GartnerG2, a technology research firm in San Jose, Calif., noting the increased use of mobile phones and online news sites after Sept. 11 last year.
Online sales for all event tickets, including movies, totaled $1.8 billion through October this year, up 50 percent from a comparable 10-month span in 2001, according to research firm comScore Networks Inc. of Reston, Va.
Although total figures for the weekend weren't immediately available, other online movie-ticket services also reported a surge in traffic because of the second movie based on the novels by British author J.K. Rowling.
AOL MovieFone Inc., owned by AOL Time Warner Inc., reported that the second Harry Potter film finished second to Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace of 1999 in online sales.
The pre-order for Potter tickets over the Internet during the past two weeks was potent enough to prompt the White Plains, N.Y., company to begin online sales this Friday for the next installment in the Lord of the Rings series. That will be a month before the movie is released, its longest pre-order in 13 years of operation, a spokesman said. Warner Bros., also a unit of AOL Time Warner Inc., produced the Potter films.
Fandango, whose partners include a half-dozen large theater chains including Loews Cineplex Entertainment and Regal Cinemas, reported that the latest Harry Potter film is helping the company surpass its monthly sales record of a year ago that included the release of the first movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. This weekend also marked Fandango's largest share of the total box office, surpassing 3.5 percent for the first Potter installment, the company said.
"Last year, Harry Potter put remote movie ticketing on the map," Art Levitt, president and chief executive officer of Santa Monica, Calif.-based Fandango, said. "This year, the momentum started early as we offered tickets more than four weeks in advance."
The $87.7 million in receipts in North America for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was the third-best opening ever, behind Spider-Man last May, at $114.8 million, and last year's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, at $90.3 million.
David Schehr, who also tracks e-commerce for Gartner G2, believes that online movie-ticket buying remains mostly a phenomenon for New York, Los Angeles and a few other major markets. Buying a movie ticket is typically an impulse buy, a cash purchase and not difficult in most places, so most consumers aren't driven to use the Internet to buy a ticket, he said.