I love Harry Potter. The movies, the books, they’re all good. And I’m not dumping on this either, per se…but I really feel like the fad of “Let’s make movies into as many parts as possible!” is getting worse and worse. It’s just, getting old. It just seems a bit presumptuous to say it’s gonna be a five part series already.
Hey, I may even like them, who knows? But it really kind of stinks of “Let’s MILK this for ALL IT’S WORTH!!” too.
I mean, we have the LoTR trilogy, then Harry Potter’s last movie HAD to be two parts. And Divergent’s last movie HAD to be two parts. And Twilight’s last movie HAD to be two parts. And The Hunger Games last movie HAD to be two parts. And The Maze Runner’s last movie HAS to be two parts. And then The Hobbit movie HAD to be three parts. Geez.
I think beginning your list with the Lord of the Rings trilogy is utterly ridiculous. It was 3 long books that they made into 3 movies. Shrinking it down into something smaller would have been awful.
Splitting up a book into more movies isn’t an inherently bad thing. Harry Potter should have been two movies per book starting with Order of the Phoenix, and the fact that it wasn’t was basically why I gave up on the movies (well, not directly, but because it was way too crammed, which was a result of not being split up).
But when a 652 page book gets one movie, and an 88-page book gets five of them, that’s pretty screwy.
First, Imma feel your pain: it is definitely exasperating to have to shell out the price of two or three tickets just to see the full version of a story that you would have been just as happy to see compressed into a single film.
But to be fair, it’s not that different from the way the movie business has traditionally operated, from the film serials of the early days of cinema to their later imitators such as the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies. You could argue that, e.g., the Marx Brothers or James Bond films don’t really count as multi-parters or film serials, but there’s definitely similarity in the sense of reusing the same characters in new situations.
Film, like TV, has always recognized the usefulness of a story that requires moviegoers to come back to the theater to find out what happened next or what the characters’ next adventure would be. A case could be made that in fact the big standalone feature film business model (Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, etc.) is more the exception than the rule.
Although I’m guessing that the “88-page book” is basically just an excuse for Rowling to do more wizarding world stuff of whatever kind she wants, irrespective of the book’s actual content.
The 88 page book isn’t a story that she’s dragging out to 5 movies. It isn’t a story at all. It’s a list of magical monsters in the Harry Potter universe with descriptions of each one - basically a monster encyclopedia (or Manual :)). She’s writing original screenplays for each movie.
I don’t give even half a shit about this particular franchise, but I generally am okay with the idea of breaking stories up across multiple movies, and I like that they’re doing it with some foresight and planning, as opposed to the “The End… ?” endings I grew up with. We’ve accepted this sort of serialization on TV, on the radio, in novels and comic books. Why not feature length movies, too?
I don’t have a problem with ten hours of film if you’ve got ten hours of story to fill it. But when you’ve got two hours of story and you add in eight hours of filler just so you can sell tickets for five bad movies instead of one good one then that’s wrong.
And this principle applies to movies, TV series, novels, comic books, and every other form of entertainment. Pick the performance length that’s right for the story. Don’t pad the story to fill more time.
Go back and read the OP’s last paragraph again. ETA: Unless someone comes along and quotes it for us.
LOTR was one of the first examples of a series of movies that tell a single story, that was planned that way from the beginning: they didn’t just make a movie and then, when it was successful, decide it was worth making more; and you couldn’t watch the movies out of order and really understand what was going on. In LOTR’s case, this approach was fully justifiable, but it became more questionable for the other, later examples the OP mentions.
I can’t tell if you’re joking or not. But the backstory of the book is that JK wrote it as a charity thing - it’s supposed to be Harry’s textbook (complete with doodles) from Hogwarts.
The movie is essentially unrelated to the book, except that the main character is the “author” of the textbook, and there are lots of magical creatures in the movie, some of whom probably also have entries in the book. Calling it “all filler” doesn’t make any sense.
If you mean the movies are “all filler”, that doesn’t make any sense either. They’re new screenplays based in the HP universe. They may totally suck, that’s certainly true. But I don’t see how JK writing original screenplays instead of writing novels first somehow makes them filler.
It’s not Rowling writing new stories that looks like filler to me. It’s Rowling writing new stories around the framework of as minimal a book as this one.
Was it ever intended to be a movie about the book?
IIRC, even from the get-go it was a movie about the author of the book writing the book. Which you could (in theory) make into as many movies as their are fantastic creatures.
Here’s the amazon page on the book. A lot of it is available in the “Look Inside” link. You’ll see it isn’t a “book” in the sense of a story or novel with an actual plot. It’s just supposed to be a textbook describing magical creatures. The only “plot” is “Newt Scamander did a lot of research on magical creatures and wrote a textbook.”
If she’d named the movie “The Adventures of Newt Scamander” would you still be complaining? Does the fact mean that she reused the name of the fictional textbook because it made a much cooler movie name mean that they must be based on each other?
I agree the original LotR movies are a good example of it, but I included it since it seemed to be the start of the “Let’s not only make a movie for each and every book, but let’s start even making two or even THREE movies for one book!” craze. Like the Harry Potter films (which I also think are great movies), those two were the forerunners who started everything. Once HP makers decided “Let’s make Deathly Hallows TWO movies instead of just one”, that’s when the floodgates on that type of idea were open, I feel. But that’s just IMO.
Yeah, waaaay too much here. I get it. Newt Scamander’s (the supposed author of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) trip to New York in the 20s is the beginning of a massive anti-Muggle/No-Maj plot that is tied directly to the dark wizard Grindlewald, who ultimately defeated by Dumbledore in the 1940s. So there is like 20 (‘real world’) years of story… but jeez, that’s quite a bit of movies. Couldn’t the storyline have started in NYC in the 30s and done a trilogy that way… I mean say Scamander finds a conspiracy against non-magical humans that spans the Atlantic in the first one, further exploration of how to bring them down in the second one, and then the final battle in the third… how would two more movies make that better?
I truly have no idea what you mean. 3 books. 3 movies. With one major exception, each movie started where the corresponding book started, and ended where the corresponding movie ended.
ETA: Are you under the impression that “Lord of the Rings” is a single book? It’s not. It’s the name of the series, consisting of 3 books: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King.
It’s a brand new story, I don’t see the problem with making 1 or 5 or 15 movies out of it. It’s not like the Hobbit where they tried to stretch one smallish book into three movies.
