Mugglenet.com's Harry Potter Should Have Died - Emerson Spartz [26]
The studios want to create something for the ages that people will watch twenty years from now. Fans waited years between books, so they’ll be glad to wait six months between movies. The payoff will be a twin set of movies that are true to the books, with all the little details we love so much. This is the last time we will sit in the dark and wait for the movie magic, and the studios want to be sure they get it right.
Yes!
Let’s not kid ourselves—this is all about the money. Warner Bros. is a business, and the purpose of a business is to make money. Why make people pay once when they can make them pay twice? They’ll get double the box-office receipts and double the payments for DVDs, calendars, and poster books. Warner Bros. knows fans will see both movies, regardless of how outraged some claim to be.
DH is actually shorter than some of the other books—OotP is longer but was gutted for the big screen. This is the last book and the last chance the studios have to make mega-Muggle-bucks, and they know the fans will pay up in order to see the grand finale.
Of course, the studios say they are really doing this for “artistic reasons.” But if that’s true, why didn’t they know which scene would be the cutoff point for the first movie? If they had it planned out “artistically,” they would already know whether to split it after Godric’s Hollow or after Malfoy Manor. The fact that the producer and the writer couldn’t decide right away means that the decision was based on accounting spreadsheets and not creativity.
The studios say that theater owners won’t go along with a four-hour movie anymore, but that’s absurd—look at recent movies, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which were blockbusters making millions of dollars worldwide. Warner Bros. knows that some fans—like the kind reading this book—won’t mind spending a whole day (or night) at the movie theater seeing DH once (or even twice—or more). But they know that there are millions of casual fans who would mind—think parents and families. Small children? Forget it.
In every other movie so far, the studios have cut out huge chunks of the story from the books and added filler they think is better. In PoA the Shrunken Heads take up more time than the Marauder’s backstory. In GoF, the dragon was more important than the return of Sirius Black, and in OotP, we had a lot of Umbridge and Filch, but very little of “Snape’s Worst Memory” (not even on the DVD). Already, characters such as Fleur Delacour and Madame Trelawney have been left out of HBP, and they’ve added an extra scene about an attack on the Burrow, which wasn’t in the book. If they will change so much in a two-hour movie, shouldn’t we expect the same in each half of DH? The answer is yes. WB’s job as a business is to entertain the casual fans, vast in numbers, and placate the serious fans—or at least not alienate them. They will do whatever they think is best to the plot, charge us twice, and know that the serious fans will see the movies anyway. It’s not about movie magic, but money magic—and this strategy is how WB brings home the Benjamins to shareholders.
Verdict
It will be quite an achievement for Warner Bros. to swish out a flick that captures the complicated essence of DH. The fans want it all and the attention to detail has to be impeccable. Of course, the studios can’t commit a Sectumsempra of the plot points or the fans will raise a ruckus