Has anyone heard why the third movie - Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban- isn’t going to come out until late 2004?
I thought it was a little strange when I saw a November 2004 date for it here.
But I checked imdb and they give the same date: here.
The only article I could find says that it starts shooting in January, but doesn’t say why the anticipate the movie will take nearly two years to complete . I thought, when the first movie was about to be released last year, that I heard that they were planning to release one movie a year, like the LOTR trilogy intends to.
Well, the filming of the LotR trilogy is all but completed. Has been for some time now. All they’re doing now is adding the effects, editting, all the good post-actor stuff. They didn’t even have the new Harry Potter cast until the beginning of the year. That’s putting a huge rush on what should be a good movie. But I’m worried aobut that seeing as normally a movie takes 2-3 yrs from conception to release. Personally I’m glad they’ll take their time on Azkaban. Yeah, they may need to find new actors for the students, but I’d rather see new actors in a good movie than familiar faces in a film that shows evidence of being hurried.
The thing to remember is that all three LotR films were filmed at the same time, so they didn’t need to rebuild sets, re-hire the same cast members, replace props and costumes that have been lost or damaged since the last film, etc. This is what made Peter Jackson’s “one film a year” schedule possible. In addition, the LotR is a finished, finite work. There are only ever going to be three LotR movie, maybe four if they go back and make The Hobbit. HP is, what, five books? With several more yet to be published. The popularity of the books may not be sustainable through the end of the series, and the same goes double for the movies (I doubt that more than three or four Harry Potter movies will ever get a theatrical release, especially if the first one is representative of the quality of the rest of the franchise) So making all the LotR movies at once, and releasing one a year, is feasible, whereas making all the HP movie at once is a practical impossibility. Especially as the story stars young (at first) children and takes place over a decade or so.
Yeah and they weren’t going to make all of those James Bond novels and then create even more stories, or do another Star Trek film or Planet of the Apes was going to end after the first sequel.
It’s the motion picture industry people. They’ll bleed the franchise dry and make all seven, if the box office is good they’ll maintain the same quality, if it drops a little they’ll cut back funding and by the seventh we’ll wish they had stopped earlier.
Personally I loved the first movie and more importantly my children absolutley adored it. It is not likely that they’ll stop watching after 3 movies.
Also it is *really * unusual, in fact almost unheard of for sequels to be released within a year of each other. It’s usually at least 2 years between sequels, at least in todays Hollywood.
The new digital technology is making it possible to make sequels faster – see Spy Kids and this summer’s followup. That’s kind of a special case, since the kid-oriented tone gives the filmmakers license to go with special effects and production design that are more goofy than realistic (and therefore faster), and in addition the director, Robert Rodriguez, was doing almost everything himself – shooting, editing, even scoring.
But yeah, it was big news a few years ago when Robert Zemeckis filmed Back to the Future 2 and 3 back-to-back and had them released in the fall and then the immediately following summer. Making a big movie like that on a rushed schedule is hard.
It’s probably so there’s time for people to forget just how bad the first two were (ok, I don’t know that the second one will be bad… I just expect it).
Don’t get me wrong, I love the books. But the first movie was awful.
Speaking of releasing sequels back to back, BOTH Matrix sequels are scheduled for release next year, the first in summer, the second around Christmas 2003.
Since this is also a Warner Bros. project, they pushed back Harry Potter 3 so it wouldn’t “conflict” with the business for the Matrix sequels.
Not that that makes any sense…the movies have completely different audiences, and going head to head with LOTR didn’t hurt the first movie, as both raked in $300+ million. Hmm, maybe they just don’t want to hire extra marketing staff…