This film, emerging four years after the original novel, marked the birth of a new consolatory pop culture myth, to rival Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, and the circumstances of its own arrival became mythic, from Rowling’s own early poverty to the snapping up of film rights. Harry Potter emerged into cinemas as we were still all stunned by 9/11, but yet to see the retaliatory “war on terror”.

(Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone is not showing in any area. It’s amazing and poignant to remember the sheer excitement of that HPATPS premiere in November 2001: I myself called it an “old-fashioned pre-September 11 news event”. The next date Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone is playing is Friday, March 10. Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone is a fantasy novel written by British author J. The Harry Potter franchise itself is still a colossal commercial entity, an IP Shangri La, although its creator JK Rowling is now at the centre of an acrimonious gender politics debate – undreamed of in 2001 – and the world of children’s and YA fiction, which she almost singlehandedly revived all over the world, is strongly policed on just these issues. Hermione struggles while getting tied all over, Ron gets wrapped in the neck to his torso as the tentacles wrap him from behind, and Harry is seen being pinned down when getting covered. Sadly, the actors who played the original Dumbledore, Snape, Uncle Vernon and Mr Ollivander – Richard Harris, Alan Rickman, Richard Griffiths and John Hurt – are no longer with us. Harry, Ron and Hermione fall into a pit full of plant tentacles called Devils Snare. T he very first Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (or “Sorcerer’s Stone” for its release in the United States, where audiences were assumed to be unfamiliar with this alchemical term) is now re-released after 20 years, into a rather different world.

Harry potter sorcerer's stone