Harry Potter's Day-One Revenues Possibly Greater than Halo 3's

When Microsoft declared Halo 3's $170 million launch the "biggest entertainment launch in history," the company claimed to have surpassed both Spider-Man 3's box office record and the latest Harry Potter novel's first day at retail. It turns out Master Chief's latest outing might not have dethroned the latest Potter party after all, as J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" could have made anywhere from $149.3 million to $290.4 million, according to MarketWatch. Microsoft based its victory assumption on a $166 million estimate of Deathly Hallows day-one sales cited in The New York Times and elsewhere, but a Scholastic book rep told MarketWatch this figure wasn't official. The publisher says it sold 8.3 million copies of the book in its first 24 hours at retail, but won't disclose its revenues. MarketWatch got its estimated range of launch-day sales from the book's variety of retail prices, which spanned from $17.99 to the suggested retail price of $34.99. Though it's kind of a silly issue, it's one of those things that sheds light on the bizarre world of video game fandom. Book readers couldn't care less if a publisher made tons of money on a recent novel, and Scholastic doesn't really have a reason to come out and declare itself champion of something like earning gobs of money on a product's launch day. Video game fans actually know the figure offhand, and are sometimes rewarded for this knowledge.