Harry Potter versus Pokémon: franchise revenue, age appeal and geographics

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is one of the most anticipated mobile games in 2018, especially after Pokémon GO became the worldwide phenomena two years ago. Developed by mostly the same studio, Wizards Unite is expected to create a similar, if not the same, amount of hype on release.

Both games are based on some of the most successful franchises in human history, and in large part, Pokémon GO owns its success to the success of the overall Pokémon franchise. Today, we’ll compare the two industry giants and see how they stack up: Pokémon versus Harry Potter franchise.

Jump to:

• Franchise revenue
• Geographics
• Age appeal

Franchise revenue

The Harry Potter franchise is the world’s third largest media franchise, according to Wikipedia, landing behind Pokémon and Star Wars. Curiously, the estimated franchise worth only includes the main Harry Potter worth and not any spin offs in J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World (Fantastic Beasts are not included). Worth is expressed in billions (B) of US dollars.

In terms of revenue breakdown, the Harry Potter franchise earnings mostly come from movies, books and merchandise:

• Box Office: $8.53 billion
• Book Sales: $7.7 billion
• Merchandise Sales: $7.3 billion
• DVD Sales: $2 billion
• Rentals: $600 million

Although Pokémon and Star Wars are much larger franchises than Harry Potter, the beloved wizarding franchise is nothing to scoff at, revenue wise.

Geographics

In order to figure out how popular Harry Potter and Pokémon are around the world, we picked 5 countries and analysed the percentage of search queries that fits one or another. For this metric, we used the all knowing Google Trends. We observed the period before Pokémon GO’s release, as we wanted to see the raw franchise numbers, not data skewed by GO’s cultural phenomena.

Google Trends gives out data relative to other search queries and can be interpreted as a popularity metric in a given region. The numbers in the table are not absolute, they represent the relative popularity of a search term in a particular region.

Despite Harry Potter’s immense success, Pokémon is still the franchise king in terms of search popularity and online interest. This is somewhat expected, given the challenging depth of Pokémon games and a growing number of online resources created for those games.

Age appeal

Surprisingly, Pokémon and Harry Potter franchises are enjoyed by a similar age group, despite early Harry Potter books being dubbed as childish and for children. According to an article by Survey Monkey, almost 70% of Pokémon GO players are ages 13 to 29:

According to a quote by Dan Fellman, the president of domestic distribution for Warner Bros. told the Wall Street Journal in 2010 the following:

“The key to this franchise is 18-34 year olds and their aging process…. When we first started ‘Harry Potter’ and cast 10-year-old Daniel Radcliffe in the title role, parents drove their 10-year-olds to see the movies. Today, those same kids are now driving themselves to the midnight shows.”

In other words, Harry Potter content is often enjoyed by the similar age group as Pokémon.