As the film industry looks ahead to box office business after “Harry Potter,” with the lucrative franchise due to wind up in the summer of 2011, one person in as good a position as most to offer an opinion on what may be the next big film series suggests that the “Twilight” vampire romances could fill the void.

“Harry Potter” 1-5 have amassed $4.5 billion at global box offices so far, and with HP 6, otherwise known as “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”, due to hit cinemas this week, the cash tills look set to go on ringing. HP 7, the final book in J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard series, has been split into two movies, meaning that at the current rate, the 8-movie series could take a cool $7.2 billion.

Last year’s first outing for the “Twilight” series, based on the Stephenie Meyer books, made $380 million worldwide, according to www.boxofficemojo.com, a far cry from HP 1. But the word — and more to the point, the hype — appears to be spreading beyond U.S. shores, and with heartthrob lead actor Robert Pattinson causing hysteria wherever he breathes, the momentum could grow.

Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry in the “Potter” pictures, knows how Pattinson feels.

“The thing that’s interesting for me is that it’s the only other franchise really which comes close to ‘Potter’ in terms of the mania that surrounds it and the attention that the leads get and how global it is,” he told reporters in London recently. “So part of me doesn’t actually want to have an opinion on the film.”

Underlining the pressures superstardom can bring, Pattinson was hit by a taxi in New York last month while trying to flee a crowd of hysterical teenage fans. He was not seriously hurt.

Radcliffe is under no illusions about why the girls scream when they see him.

“I go to Japan and they all scream and it all goes mad and it happens all over the world, but that’s a different type of me, that’s the me that’s on red carpets and stuff and that’s who a lot of people seem to be attracted to and fancy and stuff. But the me who sits in a darkened room for eight hours watching cricket with a big bowl of pasta in my socks and underwear is not nearly as appealing to women.”