Potter Works Wizardry Over Corporate Strategy

Nov. 13 -- Warner Brothers hopes Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone fans will line up by the millions this weekend to see whether they have faithfully translated the popular character from books to film.

"The same way kids go back and read the book seven, eight, 11 times, we believe they may go back and see the movie again and again and again," says Diane Nelson, a senior vice president of Warner's Entertainment.

But Harry Potter is much more than a book and more than a movie. The boy wizard is the centerpiece of a global corporate strategy.

The movie was made by the film division of AOL Time Warner. With everything from television to magazines and Internet service, the newly-formed conglomerate reaches customers 2.5 billion times a month. It has 31 million subscribers to the AOL Internet service, 280 million magazine readers and 350 million television viewers each week. And all of them will be seeing a lot of Harry Potter.

'Harry Potter Offensive'

Writer Ken Auletta, who profiled the media conglomerate for The New Yorker, calls the movie release the "Harry Potter offensive."

"I have heard them say that you won't be able to move an inch without confronting Harry Potter," says Auletta. "And we see this, they've said to me, as perhaps the biggest movie franchise in the history of movies."

A movie franchise is something like Star Wars or Indiana Jones, a movie with sequel and marketing potential. There are a lot of backpacks and lunch boxes to be sold with Harry Potter's face on them.

"They see themselves creating books out of this and TV shows and music and other movies and T-shirts and other products and using it as a promotional vehicle to get people to subscribe to their magazines or their cable," says Auletta.

Harry Potter will be used to sell AOL Time Warner toys, games, music and Internet service. Magazines owned by the media giant feature Harry Potter. Click onto moviefone.com on the Internet, owned by AOL Time Warner, and there's Harry.