WSJ.com - Older Harry Rates a PG-13

WSJ.com - The Awkward, Lovelorn Hero Of 'Goblet of Fire' May Lose Kids, Gain Broader Audience By KATE KELLY : "Harry Potter, who won moviegoers' hearts as an awe-struck first-year student at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, faces what could be his biggest challenge yet: maintaining their affections as an awkward, lovelorn teenager.

"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," the latest installment in the series based on the best-selling books by J.K. Rowling, hits U.S. theaters Friday. It takes a now 14-year-old Harry through trials both intellectual and romantic. Along with a dangerous tournament that tests his magician's mettle, the protagonist agonizes over who to invite to the school's Yule Ball; is photographed by paparazzi embracing his pal Hermione; and has his head turned by attractive female visitors from the Beauxbatons magic school.

For Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. Entertainment, the maker of the Harry Potter movies, the latest story presents an opportunity as well as a risk. The fan base for Ms. Rowling's book series, which jumped when the sixth installment was published this past summer, has remained feverishly loyal. But maintaining the interest of fickle filmgoers in an evolving character over what could amount to a decade-long span of movies may be difficult.

Factoring in world-wide box-office, home-entertainment, and merchandise sales, Harry Potter has generated some $3.7 billion in revenue for Warner Bros. since 2001, when the first film, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," was released. But theatrical movie revenue, while still robust by any standard, has declined moderately with each successive film, with the first Potter film's $318 million domestic gross falling to $250 million for the third movie last year.

Meanwhile, the cost of making the Potter movies has climbed steadily. And with a $260 million budget on "Goblet" -- which was whittled down to $200 million in actual spending after tax credits -- the loss of younger audience members could be painful. One further test: the movie's PG-13 rating, a first for a Harry Potter film.

Warner executives say they're confident that "Goblet" will draw more teenagers and adults to make up for any shortfall in the under-12 category. "Based on the research we have today, we have every reason to believe that this trending toward sort of a broad-based audience is going to continue," says Dawn Taubin, the studio's marketing chief.

In any case, the studio's own research shows that younger audience members are dropping out as Harry gets older. For "Sorcerer's Stone," 65% of the audience was defined as "family," according to Ms. Taubin, meaning it comprised parents and kids 12 years old and under. For "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets," released in 2002, 53% of attendees were family, followed by a drop-off to 40% for "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," released last year.

A teenage crowd that parallels the age of the book's main characters appears to account for a growing share of the audience, Ms. Taubin says. "Each book is a year later; everybody in the book is a year older. And so I think that the audience ends up trending a little bit older as well."

Still, the studio is cognizant that with aging actors and an author now two books ahead of them, they are racing against the clock, and they've adapted their moviemaking strategy to address that reality.

For instance, after watching the filmmaker Chris Columbus undergo a grueling production schedule to issue the first two Harry Potter movies in two years, Warner executives decided that going forward, they would hire a new director for each picture. "The challenge of making these things is so great [that] it's just a little easier to have a different director take the helm the next time around," says Alan Horn, the studio's president and chief operating officer. "With long post-production schedules and lots of visuals and special effects, it seems to make sense" to have the productions overlap to some degree.

Mike Newell, the director of "Goblet," began working on the new movie in earnest during the summer of 2003, while Alfonso Cuarón was still in the throes of making "Azkaban." By the time shooting for "Azkaban" wrapped, Mr. Newell and the "Goblet" screenwriter, Steven Kloves, were looking at the seventh or eighth draft of the movie, the director recalls. David Yates, a British TV director, will direct the next installment, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."

Mr. Newell is probably best known for his 1994 romantic comedy "Four Weddings and a Funeral," which starred Hugh Grant as a hapless English bachelor who falls for American beauty Andie MacDowell. "Goblet" has a bit of the same sensibility. And for Warner executives, the fact that Mr. Newell grew up in the U.K. and attended school there was a particular draw.

"Goblet" had a sort of two-pronged mission, according to its director. "The beam that holds it all together is the thriller," says Mr. Newell, "but then, what you've got is the adolescent stuff -- the ball, having to ask girls out, all that hateful stuff."

In shooting the movie, which began in spring 2004 with returning cast members like Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry, and Emma Watson, who plays classmate Hermione Granger, Mr. Newell tried to infuse the school year with authentic cultural touches. One example: a scene where Harry and his buddies are left sputtering over the entrance of a group of French schoolgirls led by an imperious headmistress with a page-boy haircut reminiscent of Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour.

"For the English, French women are a kind of symbol, an acme of what's unattainable," says Mr. Newell. Ms. Rowling made those characters French, he adds, as a sort of inside joke "because of course the boys were simply going to find those girls unbearably attractive."

But while Harry is mesmerized by the French girls, it is Cho Chang, a Chinese Hogwarts classmate who speaks with a Scottish lilt, whom he ultimately asks to the ball. (She declines.) That love interest doesn't prevent him from bonding with his longtime female friend Hermione, in whose embrace he finds himself caught by a meddlesome journalist, or attending the ball with yet another young lady -- all while engaging in a series of death-defying battles with dragons, undersea creatures and, eventually, his archnemesis Lord Voldemort.

"We set out to make a kind of Bollywood entertainment, a great big fountain of variety," says Mr. Newell. "It's a great big basket of goodies.""