The close of the Potter film franchise opens a new chapter for its child stars – but ends a lucrative one for JK Rowling’s agent. Cassandra Jardine reports.
05 Jul 2011
As portentous messages go, IT ALL ENDS 7.15 has an absurdist air to it. So that’s it then, Armageddon in the midst of the Channel 4 News. We will never know about the weather, but then who needs a forecast when, as the publicity posters announce, the Harry Potter era finally winds to its conclusion. Thunder and lightening are guaranteed in the cinema on July 15 as the biggest book/film franchise of all time draws to a close.
Twenty-one years since Jo Rowling sat on a train from Manchester to London and had the initial idea, 14 years after a tentative 1,000 copies of Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone were printed, the final film of the final book – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt 2 – hits the cinema screens next Friday. In that time, 450 million copies have been sold and J K Rowling has become the world’s first author to earn $1 billion from writing.
Christopher Little, 69, her agent throughout, hasn’t done badly either, with a 15 per cent share of UK book sales and a slice of revenues from elsewhere in the world. But for him IT ALL ended last week when J K Rowling left the Christopher Little Agency. She is now represented by Neil Blair, a lawyer who joined Little’s agency in 2001 from Warner Brothers, where he was head of Business Affairs, Europe. They have worked together for a decade. Now that he has set up an agency of his own, Little’s golden client has gone with him.
The shift sounds logical. Blair is younger, and has more expertise in electronic media deals. Rowling’s next move is e-publishing via the website Pottermore, which opens in October. She needs his advice more than she needs a book deal: the political fairytale for children that she’s been talking about for years has not materialised. But it was not an amicable parting. “This was a painful decision, especially as Ms Rowling had actively sought a different outcome for some weeks,” says her press statement. “However, it was not taken without good reason and it finally became unavoidable.”
Full story at The Telegraph.
Full story at The Telegraph.
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