Can You Stand the Harry Potter Wait?

After a two-year wait, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince opens in just a matter of hours. And, given the franchise's box-office track record, at just the right time.

With midnight Wednesday screening sell-outs reportedly numbering in the thousands, Half-Blood Prince seems destined to fulfill its destiny: Namely, the longer the wait for a Harry Potter movie, the more a Harry Potter movie makes. (Really. Give or take an exception. We did the math.)

All of this would seem to leave Half-Blood Prince, scrubbed from an originally scheduled November 2008 debut, poised to strike it very rich. The lag time between it and the previous entry, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, is the series' longest yet.