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Henry Blodget / Business Insider
The hottest new attraction in the United Kingdom these days is not a royal palace or some rocks in a field.
2013-04-03
It's the studio in Leavesden where Warner Bros. spent ten years making the Harry Potter movies.
A converted factory that was once used to make planes in World War II, Leavesden is still a working studio. But a big portion of it has been transformed into a gigantic show-and-tell Harry Potter sound stage exhibit.
About 5,000 people a day make the trek to Leavesden, which is a half-hour northwest of London. They pay about $30 apiece to get in.
That means that Warner is coining ~$50 million a year from Harry Potter studio tours from ticket prices alone.
(And you're not going to leave with just a ticket — believe me.)
My family is way into Harry Potter, and we were in London last week. So, of course, we went.
It was awesome.
The tour starts with a shuttle bus that picks you up at the Watford Junction train station. The one that picked us up came roaring in so fast it almost ran over my daughter. (Phew!)
Every train that comes to Watford is full of Harry Potter fans. They come from everywhere — even New Zealand. Some have scars painted on their foreheads and round glasses on their heads.
But now, while waiting, you get to see something--the original set of "the cupboard under the stairs" (Harry Potter's home in the Dursley's house on Privet Drive.)
Eventually, they open the doors, and you're herded into an introductory room, where you see videos and posters about the global impact of the Harry Potter franchise. (Suffice it to say, the world went bonkers about it.)
It's the real Great Hall — the one they filmed all those dining scenes in. It was disassembled and moved from a different part of the lot, but it's the same set.
The magic ceiling in the movies, by the way, is just a rack of stage lights on the set. All the weather and floating candles and stars that you see in the movies were CGI (computer generated images).
At the end of the Great Hall are costumes and wigs worn by some of the story's most famous characters. Now they're worn by mannequins. There's Hagrid, for example.
The actors rode brooms that were manipulated from below by these machines--sort of like mechanical bulls. The actors hung on while fans blow wind. Then the background was added later.
After Diagon Alley, it's on to an architectural studio, where you see the blueprints and models for many of the structures in the film. The drawings are extraordinarily detailed (these are real structures, after all.) Here's the Burrow.
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Henry Blodget cofounded Business Insider, then called "Silicon Alley Insider," in the loading dock of another New York-based startup in 2007. He served as Editor in Chief until 2017 and CEO until 2023. Business Insider is now owned by Axel Springer.A former top-ranked Wall Street analyst, Henry is often a guest on CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and other networks. He has contributed to The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, Fortune, New York, the Financial Times, and other publications (including, of course, Business Insider!). He has written extensively about technology and investing and is the author of "The Wall Street Self-Defense Manual: A Consumer's Guide to Investing."
