Advance sales of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" are outpacing those of current box-office champ "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" and of 2007's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" at a similar point in their sales cycles.
Eight days before its July 15 opening, "Prince" accounted for 65 percent of daily ticket sales, online ticketer Fandango said Tuesday.
Fandango said a poll of more than 3,000 visitors to its Web site found that 85 percent of respondents had read all seven Potter books. "Prince" is the sixth Potter movie of a planned eight; Warner Bros. is splitting the seventh book into two movies.
"'The Half-Blood Prince' is turning out to be one of our fastest-selling titles of the year," Fandango COO Rick Butler said.Fandango began selling "Prince" tickets June 17.