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The Eighth Harry Potter Movie

by Walt Posted on Mar 13, 2008 under Future Flick, Movies |

Seven books.

Eight movies.

It was only a matter of time, I thought, until the Harry Potter franchise had to take one of the books and split it. Fortunately, it’s the seventh and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I imagine the first one will be called
Harry Potter and the Deathly,
and the second
Harry Potter and the Hallows
which sounds like a rock band. :)

Nah, I’m sure it’s going to be more like Part I and Part II, ala Kill Bill.

Problem is, breaking a movie into two parts has the tendency to piss some people off.

Kill Bill failed as a two part movie because a lot of the good stuff that people went to go see was the action in the first half of the movie. When the second part came out, people just didn’t care that much about the resolution. They just wanted to see Part I again, just different.

This won’t happen with Harry Potter. It’s kind of funny… those of us readers who’ve read Harry know all of what’s going to happen, and yet in posts like this, we really shouldn’t talk about the details, because it would kind of spoil the movie for the movie goers who’ve never read any of the book series. I mean, sure, the big one line spoiler that came out with Book 6 and Book 7, about who lives and who dies, sure… But the rest of the details are of course known to the readers at this point.

What’s not known is the shape(s) of the movies themselves. With Half Blood Prince, Book 6, what portions do you leave out? We’ve learned that the action sequences are always the best, but that means that some other material has to be covered pretty quickly.

The reason Book 7 is split up into two movies is to split this exposition into two movies. At this point, Book 7 Part I has a fantastic opening sequence, and then does okay, and then falls flat. I can’t see how the second half of the Part I is going to NOT drag.

But, I’m a Harry Potter fan, which means I’ll hold out hope. I can’t view the Harry Potter franchise from an unbiased perspective. The series had me from the first page.

If I, however, had only seen the movies, I’d be coming to this with more of a jaundiced eye, thinking that the Warner Brothers were just wanting to milk this a bit too much. They’ll be covering up the grey hairs on Daniel Radcliffe’s temples by the end of this…