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Mr Newton says he became “fearful and respectful” of the windfall. A sudden hit can destabilise any company, but the danger is acute in the swaggering media industry. Bloomsbury banked a lot of the money, and has taken advantage of the slump in asset prices to pick up specialist and scholarly publishers. It now owns Arden, most famous for its series of Shakespeare texts, the legal publisher, Tottel, and the cricketer’s bible, Wisden. Having learned to handle magic, Bloomsbury is thus returning to its Muggle (non-wizard) roots. The ideal, Mr Newton says, is to balance the risks—and large potential profits—of the trade fiction business with the dependability and high margins of specialist publishing.
Harry Potter’s journey from the mind of a single mother to a global media franchise is a fairy tale
The next company to be touched by the commercial magic wand was even smaller. Heyday Films, a young London production outfit founded by Mr Heyman, was looking for books that could be turned into films. In another tale of magic nearly overlooked, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was picked up by Mr Heyman’s secretary in the summer of 1997. He took it to Warner Bros, with which he had a first-look deal. Although his main contact there, Lionel Wigram, was keen, senior executives did not share the enthusiasm. It took the studio until October 1998 to option the rights to the first books. Warner Bros commissioned a screenplay but then spent months negotiating with Steven Spielberg of DreamWorks, who was interested in directing. Only after he pulled out, in February 2000, did the project roll forward.
In retrospect the studio appears unforgivably tardy. But the books had taken off slowly in America. In July 1999 an article in the New York Times asked “Harry who?” Mr Wigram, executive producer of the later films, points out that fantasy was out of fashion at the time (“Lord of the Rings” had not yet appeared). A Hollywood studio was bound to question whether American audiences would warm to an inherently British story. Yet flying broomsticks and dragons are not cheap. The project appeared “too British for the studios but too big to be a British production”.