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After ten years, seven books, eight movies, and billions of dollars in revenue, the Harry Potter franchise finally came to a close in 2011. With the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Warner Bros. said farewell to their goose that laid the golden egg, leaving fans of the boy wizard with a gaping void to fill.

Consider if you will that a child who was eight-years-old when the movie was released in 2001 would have been old enough to vote by the time the final film debuted in theaters. Just as Harry, Ron and Hermione grew up before our very eyes on celluloid, so did the children who loved the Harry Potter series and were eagerly in theater seats on opening weekends. It was a series that matured with its audience, tackling ever more difficult ideas and themes, from personal responsibility to death and beyond. The Potter franchise wrote the playbook for tween-targeted pop culture, one that the Twilight series would follow a few years later. In 2012, The Hunger Games will hope to follow suit.

The Potter movie journey began in 2001, as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (or Philosopher’s Stone, depending where you live) debuted on November 16th with $90.3 million for the weekend. At the time, this was the record for the biggest opening weekend ever, and the film also set (and within a day, broke) the record for biggest single day of box office. Yes, those bragging rights were short-lived since Spider-Man took over a few months later, but the naysayers who claimed that the Potter series was too youth-oriented and that a fickle audience would not follow the series to theaters were proven wrong.

In fact, what we learned in watching the transformation of the books to film is that fans of the series spanned a wide spectrum of ages. Sure, there were kids that loved the books and they made up a large portion of the audience, but adults who simply love stories from the fantasy genre found something special in the series as well. It was this combination of audience that kept the series remarkably consistent over the years it was in theaters, leading up to the grand finale of Deathly Hallows. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone set the standard with its $317.6 million domestic finish, but it really impressed in terms of worldwide numbers, with a dynamic total of $974.7 million.

Chamber of Secrets didn’t mix things up too much, as director Chris Columbus stuck with what worked in the first film, leading some to say it felt like too much of a rehash. This was reflected somewhat in the final numbers, as the $88.4 million debut slightly underperformed the original film, while the overall result followed typical sequel behavior. Domestically, Chamber of Secrets earned $261 million, while its worldwide total came in at $879 million.

With a different calendar configuration, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban fell even further behind the first two films. With a June 4, 2004 opening, the movie had to deal with summer box office trending rather than being able to take advantage of Thanksgiving-through-Christmas legs as the first two films had done. The result was an excellent $93.7 million first weekend in North America, but final totals of “only” $249.5 million domestically and $796.6 million worldwide. (It’s a shame, too, because in my opinion this is the finest film in the series.

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