'Deathly Hallows' advance sales blowing away competition (HWT)

By R. Kinsey Lowe

Thousands of screenings of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1" have sold out nationwide, MovieTickets.com and Fandango.com report, including many of those for the movie's midnight debut tonight.

Blowing away all the competition, "Deathly Hallows Part 1" accounts for virtually all advance sales tickets the last couple of days for both online ticket vendors, with Fandango reporting 97% of all sales going for the first half of the final (unless JK Rowling decides otherwise) Potter adventure and MovieTickets tallying 96% of all sales. Other titles are posting only a little more than 1% or less.

This morning "Deathly Hallows Part 1" became MovieTickets' No. 4 all-time advance-seller ahead of 2009's "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" and behind only "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse," "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" and "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith." And the day is young; the weekend isn't even really here yet.

Movie theaters are scrambling to add wee-hours screenings to meet demand, Fandango reports, as midnight slots at many theaters have filled up, prompting some locations to add 3:15am Friday shows.

The AMC Loews Lincoln Square in New York City had sold out 11 midnight shows by midmorning Thursday, ditto AMC's Metreon in San Francisco. LA's Regal L.A. Live had sold out 8 midnighters and AMC's CityWalk complex had sold out half a dozen and counting.

Sellouts weren't confined to New York and Los Angeles, either, with Chicago, DC and Denver selling out along with locations in Florida, Georgia, Kentucky and Hawaii also posting full houses in advance of the movie's debut.

(The widely reported online leak of pirated footage from "Deathly Hallows Part 1" doesn't appear to have dampened fan fervor for the movie's debut.

TechDirt, which always takes an energetically contrary view toward what it considers studio heavy-handedness when it comes to copyright issues, suggested that Warner Bros. should instead embrace the leak as an effective marketing tool.)

Studios and exhibitors are hoping this level of enthusiasm bodes well for the 2010 holiday moviegoing season with fan interest particularly high for "Tron: Legacy" (opens Dec. 17), among other titles.

Down the line are "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" (Dec. 10, with the third entry in the Walden Entertainment series shifting studios to Fox from its previous home at Disney), "Yogi Bear" (Dec. 17, WB), and then Universal's "Little Fockers," the Coen Brothers' "True Grit" from Paramount with Jeff Bridges in the role made famous by John Wayne, and Fox's "Gulliver's Travels" with Jack Black vying for moviegoers' attention starting Dec. 22.