Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban currently beats The Conjuring 58–42

Fantasy horror edges out the haunted-house franchise.

58% 42%

Based on 19 head-to-head votes across 1 bracket

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban poster

The Verdict Genre Clash

This matchup has 19 votes — still early. The picture may shift as more people weigh in.

Cuarón's Time-Turner sequence — the camera tracking Hermione and Harry as they loop back through events the audience already watched, the earlier scenes acquiring new meaning from the new perspective — is the franchise's most structurally ambitious scene and a piece of filmmaking that Wan's more conventional haunted-house structure never attempts. The Conjuring has Wan's immaculate pacing and Vera Farmiga's committed performance. But pacing within a genre is a different achievement than reimagining a franchise's formal possibilities. The lead says reimagination outperforms perfection. Cuarón changed what Potter could be. Wan perfected what horror already was.

The Numbers

	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban	The Conjuring
Head-to-Head	58%	42%
Overall Win Rate	64%	36%
Championships	26	1
Budget	$130M	$13M
Box Office	$790M	$321M

Where This Matchup Sits

They come from different genres — Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban sits at #7 in Adventure, while The Conjuring is in the bottom quarter of Horror.

Elsewhere on the platform, they have a common problem — Toy Story beats both of them. Whatever else separates these two films, they share that one loss.

The Conjuring earned 24.7x its budget; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban returned 6.1x. But Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban wins the head-to-head — commercial efficiency doesn't carry over to the bracket.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban gets chosen fast (5.3s). The Conjuring gets chosen slowly (10.9s). Both choices are valid — they're just coming from different places.