Harry Potter Box Office: Gross, Budget and Ranking for Every Film

The eight main Harry Potter films grossed about $7.76 billion worldwide against combined production budgets of $1.155 billion, using the totals reported by Box Office Mojo and The Numbers. That is roughly $6.70 of ticket sales for every dollar spent making the films, although a gross is not a profit. The series opened with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001), directed by Chris Columbus, and the final main film arrived in 2011, so the numbers cover a full decade of releases.

Which film made the most? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 took $1.31 billion on a $125 million budget, and the Sorcerer's Stone is second with $1.03 billion, also on a $125 million budget. Those are the only two of the eight to pass $1 billion. Behind them come Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 at $961 million, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at $937 million, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at $926 million, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at $901 million, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets at $879 million and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at $812 million. The middle of that list is tightly packed, because the films ranked third to fifth all land between $926 million and $961 million.

How does the money split between home and abroad? On every one of the eight films the international gross is larger than the domestic gross, and roughly seven dollars in every ten came from outside the domestic market. Deathly Hallows: Part 2 made $383 million domestically and $929 million internationally. The Sorcerer's Stone made $320 million domestically and $715 million internationally, while the Prisoner of Azkaban had the smallest domestic total of the series at $251 million.

Opening runs were large from the start. The Chamber of Secrets opened on 15 November 2002 in 3,682 theaters, a figure that the Journal-World reported alongside a record 8,500 screens. The Prisoner of Azkaban opened in 3,855 theaters over the weekend of 4 to 6 June 2004, according to Screen Daily, and the Goblet of Fire took $102.7 million in its opening weekend from 3,858 theaters, according to Box Office Mojo.

Box Office Mojo and The Numbers do not always agree. For the Order of the Phoenix and the Half-Blood Prince, the Box Office Mojo worldwide totals do not match domestic plus international, so the figures here come from The Numbers, where the parts add up. On four other films (the Sorcerer's Stone, the Prisoner of Azkaban, the Goblet of Fire and Deathly Hallows: Part 1) the worldwide total exceeds domestic plus international by a small margin, and the worldwide figure is the one used for ranking.

The spin-offs sit on the same hub but are counted separately. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), also directed by David Yates, grossed $816 million on a $180 million budget, which narrowly puts it ahead of the Prisoner of Azkaban at $812 million. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald followed with $656 million on $200 million, and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore took $407 million on another $200 million. Together the three earned $1.88 billion on $580 million of budgets.

If you want the whole series in one sitting, the Harry Potter movies in order guide sets out release and chronological order, and the how many Harry Potter movies index lists all eleven films.

Deathly Hallows: Part 2 leads the series because it is the only film to pass $1.3 billion, and in my opinion the finale effect explains most of it. The final book was split into two films, so audiences who saw Part 1 in November 2010 then waited until July 2011 for the conclusion. Perhaps that wait helped, because Part 2 returned about 10.5 times its $125 million budget while Part 1, made for the same money, returned about 7.7 times. Added together, the two Deathly Hallows films took about $2.27 billion on $250 million of budgets.

Has any Harry Potter film made $2 billion? No single film has, and the best individual result is Part 2 at $1.31 billion. The $2.27 billion figure only appears when the two halves of the final book are counted as one story.

The middle of the saga tells a different story, and the director changes are the most useful way to read it. Columbus directed the first two films, which made $1.03 billion and $879 million. Alfonso Cuarón took over for the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), which made $812 million, the lowest of the eight. Mike Newell's Goblet of Fire (2005) recovered to $901 million, and David Yates then directed the last four main films, starting with the Order of the Phoenix at $937 million. It could be argued that the series settled into a steady range once Yates arrived, with the Order of the Phoenix, the Half-Blood Prince and Part 1 landing between $926 million and $961 million, and that only the finale broke out of it. That is my reading of the numbers, not something the studio has said.

Budgets complicate any simple ranking. The Half-Blood Prince cost $250 million, the highest of the eight, and returned about 3.7 times its budget, the weakest return in the main series. The Chamber of Secrets cost $100 million, the lowest, and returned about 8.8 times. The Sorcerer's Stone returned about 8.3 times and the Prisoner of Azkaban about 6.2 times. In my opinion, the most telling pair is Half-Blood Prince against Order of the Phoenix, because a $100 million rise in budget (from $150 million to $250 million) brought a lower gross, $926 million against $937 million.

The Fantastic Beasts films show the same arithmetic going the other way. Their worldwide grosses fell from $816 million to $656 million to $407 million, while the budgets rose from $180 million to $200 million for each of the last two. The returns drop from about 4.5 times to 3.3 times to 2.0 times. In my opinion, that is the clearest sign in the numbers that the spin-off audience thinned with each film.

What do these totals leave out? A worldwide gross is ticket revenue, and it is not profit. Box Office Mojo and The Numbers publish grosses and budgets for these films but no profit figure, and neither accounts for marketing costs or the share that theaters keep. The same applies to inflation: every figure here is the nominal amount reported by those two sites, so comparing a 2001 gross with a 2011 gross is a comparison of unadjusted dollars.

The box office story is also about to change format. The next Harry Potter release is the HBO series, reported by TODAY to premiere on 25 December 2026 (see the new Harry Potter movie and Harry Potter TV series pages). A television series earns no box office, so it adds nothing to these totals. To see how the grosses compare with how the films hold up, read Harry Potter movies ranked.