The world was introduced to Harry Potter on June 26, 1997. It never looked back.
Twenty years later, Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone, the first book in the series, is one of the bestselling books of all time. According to Scholastic, more than 400 million copies of Harry Potter titles have been sold worldwide, and they’ve been translated into 68 languages. In 2016 author J.K. Rowling released the eighth Harry Potter story, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which topped the charts as the bestselling book of the year.
The Harry Potter books were first adapted for the big screen in 2001 with the film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Every film in the series except Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is among the 50 highest-grossing films of all time with …Deathly Hallows (Part 2) coming in at No. 8 with $1.34 billion. As of 2015, the Harry Potter series is the second-highest grossing film franchise of all time. Its eight films have grossed more than $7.7 billion worldwide.
In 2014, Universal Parks and Resorts opened The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, a chain of theme parks based on the Harry Potter franchise. The series also counts $7.3 billion from related toys and $2 billion from DVD sales. In all, the Time Warner franchise is now worth more than $25 billion and growing—not bad for a story that started as a 200-page hand-written manuscript rejected by 12 publishers.
