With the latest Harry Potter movie opening across North America tomorrow, “The Half-Blood Prince” is already — and perhaps expectedly — among the hottest-selling movie tickets of the year.

From Alaska to Florida, 2,500 midnight showtimes of “The Half-Blood Prince” have sold out, according to Fandango, a top movie and entertainment online ticket seller.

The website is currently selling an average of eight Harry Potter tickets per second.

It seems the British boy wizard has cast the right spell to reclaim his spot among the top 3 advance-ticket sellers of all time, a coveted honor lost last fall to “Twilight”.

In fact, by the end of the day, “The Half-Blood Prince” may even outpace “The Dark Knight” in advance-ticket sales.

“Harry Potter fans are insanely loyal,” said Fandango spokesperson Harry Medved. “And it’s clear that the online buzz and positive reviews for ‘The Half-Blood Prince’ are fueling the online ticket sales.”

This should come as a surprise to the Wall Street Journal.

An article posted Friday on their website argued that Harry Potter fans were getting too old for spellbooks and Quidditch.

The article further stated the average teen would rather spend time with “the gorgeous vampire (Robert Pattinson) who fights his own biological destiny to fall in love with Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), a human girl” in the Twilight series.

While there is no denying Potter fans are growing up (the first Harry Potter book was published in 1997), are they really ready to abandon the boy wizard en masse?

The numbers suggest most fans have room for both.

Fifty-five percent of people who plan to see “The Half-Blood Prince” said they are also fans of the Twilight series of books, according to Fandango.

And 59 percent of people who plan to see “The Half-blood Prince” said they are looking forward to “New Moon”, the upcoming Twilight movie.

But there is one category where Harry Potter has Twilight beat.

While 63 percent of people planning to see “The Half-Blood Prince” are female, there is still a sizable group of males looking forward to watching Harry Potter’s latest adventure on screen.

“It’s not like Twilight,” said Medved. “That was 80-90 percent female.”

Medved added that Twilight’s popularity may have been fueled by the fact that “The Half-Blood Prince” was delayed from its original release date in November of 2008.

“A lot of fans had to satisfy themselves with ‘Twilight,’” said Medved. “I’m assuming that some went to see ‘Twilight’ to get their fantasy and romance fix.”

The draw of a romance-infused plot line has not escaped the “Half-blood Prince” producers. If this trailer is any indication of what is to come, the latest movie promises plenty of romance.

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.”

The “Harry Potter” series is all grown up, that is if you count an on-screen lip lock as a sign of maturity. In one of the most talked about moments in an upcoming “Harry Potter” movie, Emma Watson, who plays witchcraft ingenue Hermione Granger, kisses Rupert Grint, the actor who plays Harry Potter’s friend Ron Weasley.

It does not come in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” which opens in the U.S. and many other countries on July 15, but in the next installment in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” which is split into two movies.

Still, fans of the series can’t wait to see that bit of cinematic spark between Watson and Grint, and interestingly they appear to be less interested in Harry Potter working his own romantic mojo. In a poll conducted by online ticket seller Fandango.com, 59 percent of respondents said the on-screen kiss they most want to see is between Hermione (Watson) and Ron (Grint). Only 41 percent of respondents said they can’t wait to see the peck between Harry Potter (played by Daniel Radcliffe) and Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright). 

Maybe that has something to do with the screen appeal of the 19-year-old Watson, who was listed No. 82 on men’s magazine Maxim’s list of the most beautiful 100 women in the world.

The fact that a kiss is one of the most anticipated moments in the “Harry Potter” series shows how the movies have evolved along with the audience to more adult themes of love and romance.

On that note, director David Yates said in this Reuters story: ”Our cast are just getting that little bit older now and the hormones are starting to fly and for me it marks a real transition point between our cast as children and our cast as adults.” 

Watson herself seemed to describe a dizzying conflict of impulses in an explanation of her kiss with Grint. On the BBC program Friday Night with Jonathan Ross,” Watson said that she was not thrilled to do the kissing scene, because of the public interest. “I pounced on him, I was so desperate to get it over with,” Watson said on the program.

In other findings from the Fandango poll of more than 1,000 ticket buyers, 69 percent said that the critics’ (mostly positive) reviews of the new film have no effect on their decision to go. Also, the last movie in the series, 2007’s “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” ranked as respondents’ favorite movie in the series with 36 percent of the overall vote.

Okay all you aspiring young wizards and Harry Potter fans, in general. We’re certain you were disappointed when Warner Bros. delayed the release of the upcoming “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” until July, from its previously scheduled roll-out date earlier this month.

But never fear, cable network ABC Family is hosting a weekend of four of the “Harry Potter” films PLUS a “first look” at portions of “Half-Blood Prince.” The “Harry Potter” weekend will run on ABC Family December 5-7.