Bad news, Harry Potter fans: you are officially old
Fantastic Beasts box office statistics reveal that The Boys and Girls Who Lived through the first Harry Potter films are all grown up
You're getting old, Harry Potter fans. We really mean it this time.
Yes, The Cursed Child featured a grown-up Potter and yes, we all take a million quizzes about the nineties every day, but here's when you know you're past it: when you slip into a new demographic.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them took $75 million over the weekend at the US box office. But this was not a new generation of witches and wizards spending their pocket money. Nope, 65% were over the age of 25, 35% were under 25 – and just 18% were under 18.
Do you understand what this means? Harry Potter is now something parents drag their kids to.
In fact, Variety reports that 51% of consumers came to Fantastic Beasts because of its connection to the previous films. They were very much Harry Potter converts already. We're guessing most of them have been officially sorted on Pottermore, but comScore didn't survey that.
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“The story itself skews a little older," admitted Jeff Goldstein from Warner Bros. "From the first Potter film to the last, we’ve seen our audience age up."
Yes, it's true that Fantastic Beasts continues the trend of Rowling's stories getting darker, and that this could lead to an older audience. But do you know the more likely culprit?
Time.
