Talk:Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (film)

Philosopher's Stone vs Sorcerer's Stone debate summary

The following summarizes archived debate discussions regarding motions to change the name of the article from the British Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to the American Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. There are additional shorter discussions and queries on the same general subject that have also been archived along with the main discussions.

Requested move

The first major actionable discussion debate was proposed in July 2007 as a formal move request to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (film), which was in turn in response to a discussion debate entitled Why the different name?. Both are topics located at the Move Request subpage, with the Why the different name? discussion included there as a preamble to the move request. The result of the straw poll move request survey: Three users (including one anonymous IP user) supported moving the article, to 16 users opposing the move. An ensuing discussion debate included 13 participants, with three firmly debating in support of the move, six firmly against, and three more appearing to be neutral acting as clerks: asking general questions, or making general observations without stating a clear position for or against. The conclusion was there was no consensus to move the article, and the subject was closed by a neutral non-participating third-party after 4 days.

RfC: Title of this article

In January 2008 after another Title discussion, the general subject was taken up again as a formal Request for Comment on the title - see the Title RfC subpage. Many of the participants in the original Move Request discussion rejoined, and many new ones joined in. There was no formal "poll" but rather a re-examination and discussion debate of the issues raised from the July debate. The discussion included approximately 25 participants, with 2 participants debating in support of changing the title to Sorcerer's Stone, 22 debating against, and one neutral. After one month the RfC was closed by a neutral non-participating third-party. The precursor discussion from Aug-Dec 2007 that resulted in the RfC is included as a preamble. The subsequent Notice of Mediation announcement and discussion (see also Further Actions below) is tagged on at the end of the RfC subpage as a postscript.

Further actions

Administrator's Noticeboard / Incidents

In mid-January 2008, some of the parties in support of the title change sought relief from the Administrator's Noticeboard of Incidents - see Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone vs. Philosopher's Stone. The inquiry was turned away within an hour as not an issue for ANI to resolve, but rather for dispute resolution, with recommendations to take the dispute to an RfC, which was already underway but near to closing.

Request for Mediation

Parties in support of changing the title also sought relief from the Mediation Committee - see Wikipedia:Requests for mediation/Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (film). The case was rejected after about 5 hours, as the involved parties did not agree to mediation.

Request for Arbitration

Parties in support of the title change also sought relief from the Arbitration Committee - see Sorcerer's Stone vs. Philosopher's Stone. The Arbitrators declined and rejected the case as a content dispute, and the case was subsequently withdrawn without prejudice.

Similar discussion elsewhere

A similar discussion debate was held during April and July 2007. See Talk:Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (film)/Archive 3#What makes a film from a certain country?.

Music Situation/Remove Conrad Pope's Credit

Why are we crediting Orchestrator Conrad Pope? There is no reason to. We should save his name for the soundtrack page. Also, he's not the only orchestrator for the first three Potters, seriously, why don't we just credit every single individual who was associated with the music? The music is by John Williams and no one else, why should we credit someone who didn't write a single piece of music for the film, but only arranged it? My opinion, remove his credit and relocate it to the soundtrack page, because if there isn't a credit for Pope on the Soundtrack page, why should there be a credit for him on the film's page? ThatsGoodTelevision ThatsGoodTelevision, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Billion dollar club and Box Office Mojo

@Betty Logan and TropicAces: we have a situation here. It's been recently reported by several outlets that Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone has joined the billion-dollar club. However, it has since become clear that that was based on Box Office Mojo's corrupted numbers, which have now been corrected to show the right number: $996.1 million. El Millo (talk) 01:30, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

right, but BOM isn’t the end-all/be-all. There are other sites and services that track box office grosses, and the odds of Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline all solely using Box Office Mojo as their financial information is slim-to-none (I can tell you for a fact Deadline does not). We don’t have to take BOM as gospel; the billion dollar figure is properly cited. Warner Bros. head of international distribution even acknowledged it; BOM is a mess, but I think we’re safe leaving the billion dollar note. That being said, its likely to make another $4 million in China and cross it anyways this weekend, so we can just update it then. TropicAces (talk) 03:30, 20 August 2020 (UTC)tropicAces

• Comment TropicAces actually makes a very sound point: if Box Office Mojo is anomalous and the other sources are consistent then we must question the accuracy of Box Office Mojo. However, I can perhaps shed some light. When contacting Box Office Mojo about some of the errors in their data this was their explanation:

  The cause of these problems is that distributors are inconsistent when reporting data for re-releases; sometimes they start counting gross-to-date from zero, and sometimes they start reporting it from the last known value, even if it was decades ago. Sometimes they use the re-release date and sometimes they use the original rele ase date, and what they choose to do varies by distributor/area/week. Box Office Mojo keeps track of grosses/GTD starting from zero for each individual re-release in each area, which many distributors don't do themselves, so it's often a case of us having to deduce concrete figures via heuristics based on limited data, intent, and history. The situation is acute at the moment because with COVID-19 there's a glut of re-releases around the world dominating the charts and industry is scrambling with ad-hoc auditing and reporting procedures.

  So in other words the problem isn't BOM, or Deadline, or Variety, the problem is the distributor. It reports raw data and sometimes they have to reverse engineer the figures to get the gross for the new release. This explanation would seem to chime with this situation: the distributor reported the raw data and when added on to the lifetime gross this took Harry Potter 1 over $1 billion, and this was reported as such. Box Office Mojo subsequently corrected the error. The other outlets may or may not follow suit. BOM only corrected it because we noticed they were counting some of the grosses twice and notified them. Betty Logan (talk) 05:50, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

Reliable sources

If the "reliable sources" are not actually reliable it might be better to not use that source as a reference alongside figures that do not match what that source claims. In the unlikely event that a reader actually looks at the reference the mismatch between the source and the figure in the Infobox is confusing and unhelpful. The hidden comment points to WP:BOXOFFICE which does partly explain the discrepancy but it is hidden and really not clear enough. Ignoring the reliable source seems highly irregular but there seems to be consensus to override it anyway. It is an awful mess. Using an {{Explanatory footnote}} would at least be an improvement over a hidden comment. Also whatever the correct box office gross is actually supposed to be is not easy to verify, and the article body does not match the figure listed in the Infobox. The infobox is supposed to summarize not the supplant the article body, please make sure the figures match! -- 109.79.66.134 (talk) 06:52, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Film was produced in US, so why british english?

Confusion here. Jishiboka1 (talk) 02:00, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

It's a co-production, so on that front it could go either way. On every other front, the franchise is primarily a British film. Producer David Heyman is British, the whole cast is British, the characters are British, the locations are British, the original books are British. —El Millo (talk) 03:34, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Small change

As the page is writtien in British English I changed "gotten" to "got". 147.147.29.0 (talk) 20:31, 18 April 2024 (UTC)