The spin-off follows Newt Scamander, a minor character in the Harry Potter books.
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Written by Rowling, playwright Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany, the two-part play is set 19 years after “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, the final novel in the original series, released in 2007.
That is an enchanting amount but still pales in comparison to the 8.3 million copies Deathly Hallows sold in just 24 hours in America.
The first movie tells the story of Newt Scamander (played by Eddie Redmayne), author of Harry’s future textbook, traveling to New York City in the 1920s with unsafe magical beasts in tow.
Waterstones buying director Kate Skipper said in a statement that no hardcover had sold so quickly in the United Kingdom since Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” in 2009.
On Amazon, customers only gave 3.3 stars out of 5 to “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One and Two”.
At its current rate, it is on track to become the second biggest single-week sales for a book since records began. “Cursed Child” debuted as a play in London on Saturday and in printed form (as a rehearsal script) on Sunday.
While the title of the book is pretty self-explanatory of its contents, the big screen adventure will be way more dynamic.
“When we adapted the books, we’d always have to leave out things you hated leaving out because they didn’t quite work in the structure of the storytelling for the movie”, he said.
Scholastic said it had ordered 4.5 million first printing copies of “Cursed Child” and retailers had reported “fast-paced, record-breaking pre-sales” ahead of the release date.
It is expected that tickets will be priced from £15 per show and they will be hard to get – so make sure you’re ready just before 11am to get yours.
“I was at Heathrow Airport looking at the new Harry Potter books on display and girl from Hong Kong came up to me and asked: ‘They’re buy one get one half price”.
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He said: “I suppose I’d go with the first”.
