19 Years Later, Harry Potter Passes $1 Billion At The Box Office Thanks To Re-Release

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the original film in the fantasy series, has passed $1 billion at the global box office 19 years after it was originally released in 2001.

Following a re-release of the film in 4K 3D in China over the weekend, the movie has now reached $1,001,260,000 at the global box office. The entire franchise, meanwhile, has passed $7.74 billion worldwide, according to numbers crunched by Deadline.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone made $13.6 million over the weekend in China across 16,000 screens.

"We are thrilled to see Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone delight a new generation of audiences," Warner Bros. executive Andrew Cripps said in a statement. "The popularity of the film with moviegoers in China, who are discovering it for the first time, proves that the appeal of these stories is truly timeless and universal."

The Sorcerer's Stone is just the second mainline Harry Potter movie to reach $1 billion worldwide, joining Deathly Hallows Part II ($1.4 billion). The least commercially successful Harry Potter film was The Prisoner of Azkaban, which made $796.8 million worldwide, and this gives you an idea about just how enormously popular the series was.

The main Harry Potter movie series ended in 2011 with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II. Another Harry Potter universe series, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, debuted in 2016 and it was followed up with a 2018 sequel subtitled The Crimes of Grindelwald.