People like to knock the king. That's just the way it is. Harry Potter set a record this weekend in ticket sales. Forbes, however, is calling it a fraud. Without getting into an analysis of the lack of scientific thought in the article, one thing deserves to be pointed out because it is an outright fallacy and the journalistic community needs to stop lying to us on this one. One disclaimer, these reporters don't know they're lying to us since they pay less attention to detail than we do, so it's not really their fault. Anyway, here's a quote from the article that uses a comparison to show why the Harry record is a fraud:

• "In 1961, when Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth's single-season home-run record, Major League Baseball's record-keepers put an asterisk by Maris' name because he hit his 61 home runs in a 162-game season. The Babe hit his 60 in 154 games. By the same token, there should be an asterisk or two next to Harry Potter."

The problem? There never was an asterisk in the baseball record book. In point of fact, there was no official record book at the time Maris hit 61. Allen Barra tells the story concisely. I find the asterisk fraud to be annoying. As for Harry Potter, I think, as long as there are accurate stats, a good comparison should be made between it and the previous record-holders. However, the stats bar is high on this one since right now we talk about how many theatres or (more accurately) how many screens a movie opens on. What this doesn't take into account is how long a movie is. Lost World is 129 minutes. Star Wars I is 133 minutes. Harry Potter is 152. Length affects how many times a movie can be shown on a screen. It may very well be that Lost World made more money per showing than any other, but the fact remains that the dollar take for Harry breaks all previous openings. I'm bored today, that's why I'm harping on this so much.
- posted by levinson @ 11/19/2001 01:35:00 PM