Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Plot

Harry Potter and his cousin Dudley Dursley are set upon by Dementors while at the Dursley home. Harry drives them off with a Patronus charm. The Ministry of Magic catches him using magic and kicks him out of Hogwarts, though he is later cleared of wrongdoing. The Order of the Phoenix, a covert group started by Albus Dumbledore, tells Harry that the Ministry is trying to suppress talk of Lord Voldemort's comeback.

At the Order's base, Harry's godfather Sirius Black says Voldemort is after something he once lacked; Harry thinks it might be a weapon. Cornelius Fudge, the Minister for Magic, appoints Dolores Umbridge as the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts. Umbridge's refusal to teach actual defensive spells leads to conflict with Harry. She makes him write lines for claiming Voldemort is back, and a magical quill carves the words into his hand.

Ron and Hermione are furious, but Harry won't tell Dumbledore, who has been keeping his distance. As Umbridge tightens her grip on the school, Ron and Hermione assist Harry in creating Dumbledore's Army, a secret club for teaching defensive magic. Umbridge recruits Slytherins into an Inquisitorial Squad to spy on other students. Meanwhile, Harry and Cho Chang start to have romantic feelings for each other.

One night, Harry has a vision of Arthur Weasley being attacked at the Ministry, seeing it through the attacker's eyes. Worried that Voldemort might use this link, Dumbledore has Severus Snape instruct Harry in Occlumency to shield his mind. During a session, Harry glimpses Snape's memories of James Potter bullying and tormenting Snape at school. The mental connection with Voldemort pushes Harry further away from his friends.

Around the same time, Bellatrix Lestrange, Sirius's unstable Death Eater cousin, breaks out of Azkaban along with nine other Death Eaters. At Hogwarts, Umbridge and her Inquisitorial Squad uncover Dumbledore's Army. Dumbledore is wrongly blamed for forming it and flees when Fudge orders his capture. Harry suspects Cho betrayed the group to Umbridge, which ends their romance. Umbridge takes over as Headmistress.

Production

David Yates, a British director known for television, took the helm for this film after several other directors—Mike Newell (who directed the previous film), Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Guillermo del Toro, Matthew Vaughn, and Mira Nair—all declined the job. Yates thought the studio approached him because his earlier TV work, including State of Play, Sex Traffic, and The Girl in the Café, showed he could handle a story that was "edgy and emotional" with a "political backstory."

Producer David Heyman agreed, calling the film political in a small-p sense, focused on teen rebellion and the misuse of power, and noted Yates had made political UK films without being heavy-handed. Actress Emma Watson added that the movie touches on life after July 7, how people act when scared, how truth gets denied, and the challenges society faces, suggesting that recognizing corrupt authority requires a non-conformist view of reality and power.

Screenwriter Steve Kloves, who wrote the first four Potter films, was unavailable due to other projects. Michael Goldenberg, once considered for the first film’s script, stepped in to write this one. Kloves later returned to write the remaining movies. Mark Day edited the film, Sławomir Idziak handled cinematography, and Jany Temime designed the costumes. Choreographer Paul Harris, a frequent collaborator with Yates, developed a unique physical system for wand combat to stage the fighting scenes.

Casting started as early as May 2005, when Daniel Radcliffe confirmed he would return as Harry. During the media buzz around the release of Goblet of Fire, most of the main actors—including Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Matthew Lewis, Bonnie Wright, Katie Leung, and Ralph Fiennes—announced they were coming back. New character casting announcements stretched across 2006. Evanna Lynch landed the role of Luna Lovegood after beating out more than 15,000 other girls at an open casting call, where hopefuls queued for a mile. Saoirse Ronan also auditioned but was deemed too young.

Release

The promotional campaign for the film began with its first trailer, which premiered on November 17, 2006, before screenings of the Warner Bros. film Happy Feet. That trailer became available online two days later, on November 20, via the Happy Feet website. An international trailer was released online on April 22, 2007, at 14:00 UTC, and the US trailer followed on May 4, 2007, shown ahead of Spider-Man 3.

Three promotional posters that appeared online, featuring Harry alongside six classmates including Hermione Granger, sparked media controversy. Though the images were nearly identical—with one version advertising the IMAX release—one poster altered the profile of Hermione, played by Emma Watson, by enhancing the outline of her breasts to make her figure curvier. Melissa Anelli, who ran the prominent fan site The Leaky Cauldron, commented on this.

The video game adaptation, developed by EA UK, launched on June 25, 2007, alongside the mobile game Harry Potter: Mastering Magic from EA Mobile. Lego produced only one set for the film, a model of Hogwarts, which was the smallest number of sets they had created for any Harry Potter movie to that point. NECA released a series of action figures, while a larger range of smaller figures came from PopCo Entertainment, a subsidiary of Corgi International.

This was the third Harry Potter film to debut simultaneously in standard theaters and IMAX. The IMAX version presented the entire movie in 2D, with the final 20 minutes converted to 3D. Warner Bros. Pictures estimated in March 2007 that the film would open on over 10,000 screens across the summer.

Reception

The film's global opening over five days reached $333 million, ranking it as the fourteenth highest of all time. In the U.S., nearly all tickets for hundreds of midnight screenings sold out through Fandango, accounting for about 90% of the site's weekly sales. Across the U.S. and Canada, those early-morning shows on July 11 earned $12 million from 2,311 screenings, described as the most successful batch of midnight exhibitions ever. Its single-night earnings trailed only At World's End, which had premiered four hours earlier that same date.

Leaked studio documents from July 2010 indicated the film cost Warner Bros. Pictures roughly $167 million in losses. On Wednesday, after midnight, the movie brought in an additional $32.2 million in North America, pushing its total to $44.2 million from 4,285 theaters. That Wednesday gross set a new record for the biggest single-day Wednesday in box office history, surpassing Spider-Man 2's $40.4 million from 2004, though Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen later broke it in 2009 with $62 million.

At the time, it also claimed the fifth-largest opening day ever, beating At World's End's $42.9 million. On IMAX screens, it earned $1.9 million from 91 locations, the highest opening-day IMAX gross for any day of the week, topping Spider-Man 3's $1.8 million. The UK saw a similar trend, with the film earning £16.5 million over its first four days, setting a new national record for the biggest four-day opening weekend.