Potter ticket sales brisk

A single poster is all that announces what might be the biggest movie event of the year at Cape West 14 Cine.

Nonetheless, tickets to "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" are already selling quickly for its Nov. 16 opening, said Kevin Dillon, theater manager.

"Some movies need the extra help," he said of the elaborate displays that accompany many blockbusters. "This one is doing fine on its own."

Indeed, although most box-office outlets decline to disclose totals, they said the tickets were selling faster than any other film this year.

Kim Holt, spokeswoman for Movietickets.com, said the Potter sales were already five times higher than the company's previous record-holder, "Pearl Harbor." Tickets went on sale Nov. 2.

Intertops, the Internet sports betting site, set 11-to-25 odds that "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" will break the $72.1 million three-day, opening-weekend box-office record set by "Jurassic Park: The Lost World" in 1997. It also set 1-to-2 odds that the film will break or tie the record for fastest to earn $100 million: five days, set by "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace" in 1999.

Based on the first in a series of best-selling children's novels by J.K. Rowling, the $125 million movie is about a mistreated orphan who learns he has magical powers when he is invited to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardy.

Published in the United States in 1998, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" introduced readers to quidditch, invisibility cloaks, muggles and dementors.

Mostly families

So far Dillon said most tickets to the film seem to be going to families.

But like the Harry Potter books, the film has interest from adults too, he said. One woman purchased about 45 tickets so she could go with all her friends.

Dillon said advance sales have been brisk at the ticket window, over the telephone and on the Web site, www.Cine-Tix.com.

He expects a big opening weekend with the movie playing a total of 14 times a day on Saturday and Sunday. The first show is at 4 p.m. Friday.

Sales this early are unusual said Rich King, spokesman for AMC Theatres, which has 2,792 screens in the United States.

"Most advance ticket sales usually peak two to three days before the show," King said. "It's never anything like this."

Staff writer Andrea L. Buchanan contributed to this report.