In the fall of 1997, George Jones—chief of licensing and retail at Warner Bros.—was reading the just-published Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, on the rapt recommendation of his London office head. "He told me this would make a great movie that could sell a lot of merchandise," recalls Jones. A couple chapters into the maiden adventures of J.K. Rowling’s wizard-apprentice, Jones experienced his own flash of illumination so entrancing that he could have been brandishing the “Lumos” mystical wand-cum-torch that guides Harry from darkness to glory.
“The book had sold 30,000 copies to that point,” recalls Jones. “No one from our studio, or any other studio as far as I know, had even heard of it. But we’d already had great success selling the movie heads on doing the ‘Space Jam’ and ‘Scooby- Doo’ films tied to product licensing campaigns, and I’m agreeing with my London lieutenant that this could be a phenomenon. I’m already imagining candy inspired by the magic beans, not to mention selling tons of Harry Potter t-shirts, capes, games, toys you name it.’”
