Disney has been trying to get their hands on Harry Potter for quite a while. When the first movie was made, Harry Potter was already a phenomenon but no one knew how it was going to translate into a movie. It broke the first major rule of movies which is never work with kids……and in this movie instead of one extremely talented kid, you needed 3 extremely talented kids plus a whole school full of pretty talented kids….which in the movies is an extremely tall order…..to make matters worse, there were some conditions that JK Rowling had been insisting from the beginning including that the movie was not animated (Steven Spielberg would have been the director if she had allowed him to do it in animation), was filmed in Britain, had an all British cast, and JK Rowling would retain control of all of the characters, situations, and locations as well as strict script approval. Disney was in the bidding war for the first Harry Potter movie, but it went completely against their ethos of full control (Disney likes being able to throw the characters into their park at will, but the contract JK Rowling had made that impossible….so it was only the movie that was being bid on). Disney decided to low ball the offer since it was so risky……a bad contract, a school full of child actors, and fantasy movies had been taking a beating recently…..Warner Brothers had been in the mood of betting big at the turn of the century and that kind of mentality was paying off with really big hits and high profile failures that would at least make enough to earn their budget back….so it was really good days for them, they had solid relationships and contracts with George Clooney, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, Stephen King, Stephen Spielberg, Denzel Washington, Ann Rice, and many other high profile names in the hopper all coming out with new materiel around the time Harry Potter was going to be in the theaters. Warner Brothers felt like it was a gamble worth making, while Disney balked (and keep in mind that during this time, the Disney parks were being run by the accountants who were trying to bleed every little expense they could out of the business).
After winning the development rights, Warner Brothers then did probably the most intelligent thing they could have done while making all of the fans beat their head against a wall thinking that it was the most spectacularly stupid thing ever thought of and hired Chris Columbus to direct the movie, who was hired because he had been so successful directing kids in Adventures in Babysitting, Home Alone, and Mrs. Doubtfire. But as it turned out, Chris was the perfect man for the job and had been wanting to take a bite out of something much better than comedies that wear on the nerves after the second viewing.
After the success of the first movie, Disney tried to get back in the game and tried to persuade JK Rowling to break with Warner Brothers, but once again, the Warners knew what they had and signed a contract with JK for all of the rest of her Harry Potter books, even the ones that hadn’t been written yet.
Disney then tried to get back in the game a different way by attempting to buy Scholastic, the US publisher of the Harry Potter Books, but Eisner had a tough time trying to sell the Disney board on the idea and I don’t think they ever got around to even making an official offer, since it would have cost the Walt Disney Company around 5-6 billion to buy the book publisher even as the book markets were starting to see major declines.
Fast forward a couple of years and Disney had somehow made the pitch that if Harry Potter wanted to live on forever, he needed to be in the Disney parks, similar to the kind of popularity that Star Wars and Indiana Jones had been having. The problem is that George Lucas is a fan of Disney and was willing to license his characters relatively inexpensively in exchange for having some creative control and a really cool ride system that no one had ever seen before. JK Rowling had no illusions that she was doing Disney a favor and not the other way around and never significantly reduced her asking price, wanted full creative control, and wanted the people working on the movie to be technical resources to make sure that everything looked exactly right. One of the more contentious issues was around entry into the Harry Potter area, which JK Rowling had insisted should be through the a magical portal at the back of the three broomsticks, something that Disney didn’t think could handle the crowds.
Negotiations went on and off again for nearly three years. Everything came to a head one weekend when JK Rowling was in Florida meeting with the Disney people and had a fairly contentious argument with the Disney staff to the point that she walked out of the meeting. Instead of heading back to the airport, JK decided to instead go over to Universal. She got to the front gate, declared who she was, and more or less demanded to see the president of the park. Within three days, Universal had agreed to just about every demand that she had made, including the price and high level ideas about where it would go in the parkm and what it would contain, and a letter of intent was signed. Designs were immediately started, approved, and construction started within 10 months. What was even more surprising about this is that Universal had just announced the closing of the Back to the Future ride to be replaced by the Simpsons, something that become much more expensive than originally planned as the voice actors had refused to do the ride unless they were paid much more than initially proposed….so Universal was betting quite a bit of their future on the success and popularity of the Simpsons and Harry Potter rides.
The rest, as they say, is history…..except for the bit that is in the future with Harry Potter being so popular in the amusement parks that Universal Studios Japan and Hollywood are lining up with their hat in their hands begging for Harry Potter to come to their park as well. While construction has not quite started for either, both are on the slate to get their Potter fix, as well as more Harry Potter love in Florida.