All eight 'Harry Potter' films to return to theaters in IMAX
All eight 'Potter' movies will be back in IMAX theaters later this month. The return will take place ahead of the debut of the new 'Potter' movie 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.'
The 'Harry Potter' movies star Matthew Lewis (l.), Emma Watson (second from l.), Rupert Grint (second from r.), and Daniel Radcliffe (second from r.).
Discovery Times Square/PR Newswire
The boy wizard will be back in movie theaters.
The eight films in the “Harry Potter” movie series will screen in IMAX movie theaters for a week, beginning on Oct. 13. The films will reappear about a month before an all-new film set in the “Potter” universe, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” arrives.
The last “Potter” movie was released in 2011. The film series stars Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint.
The return of the “Potter” movies follows the debut earlier this year of a stage play set in the “Potter” universe, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which is currently being staged in London.
Warner Bros., the studio behind films set in the “Potter” universe, isn’t the only studio to bring back recent hit films. The original three "Star Wars" films returned to theaters in the 1990s, and marathons of previous movies are fairly common to attempt to build anticipation (there was a marathon of Marvel movies at AMC Theatres prior to the release of the movie “Captain America: Civil War,” for example). Disney, for one, has in recent years re-released some of their past animated hits in 3-D.
Like the re-release of the “Potter” series, these Disney releases come with the lure of seeing favorite movies in a new format, if “Potter” fans didn’t see the movies in IMAX the first time around. (All but the first two were released in IMAX when they first debuted.)
Disney has re-released movies such as “The Lion King,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Finding Nemo,” and “Monsters, Inc.” in 3-D.
“The Lion King” was the most successful of these, with MTV writer Ryan J. Downey pointing out that the film “earned more than the other three new releases combined” in its opening weekend.
But Disney actually moved away from this strategy after others didn’t perform as well, with Reuters writer Ronald Grover reporting that the studio decided not to go forward with a planned 3-D release of “The Little Mermaid,” and calling the 3-D releases of “Beauty and the Beast” and “Monsters, Inc.” “disappointing.”