Last month, Warner Bros. triumphantly announced that they would be
splitting Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows – the seventh and final book of the
landmark series – into two films in order to "do the book, and its
many fans, justice." Fervent fans, still ticked off that previous
Harry Potter films have cut subplots and characters, rejoiced at the
news: more Harry Potter to look forward to! Yay!
But they're wrong. This is a terrible idea, and I beg Steve Kloves – who's dutifully writing Part 1 of Deathly Hallows as we speak – to see reason and stand up to the studio. What follows are just a few reasons why this is a really bad idea. And in case there are any doubts to my motives, I'm a big Potter fan myself.
5. It's the most painfully obvious money-making scheme ever.
This one is such a no-brainer it almost doesn't need to be on the list: Warner Bros. is not splitting up the films as a commitment to artistic integrity. They're doing it because Harry Potter is a license to print money. Worldwide, Harry Potter is already the highest-grossing film franchise in history, beating the sum of the six Star Wars films and the sum of the twenty-one James Bond films; apparently unsatisfied with merely being the best, they now have three more films to add to that total.
4. The actors will get even older.
By itself, this doesn't bother me that much – on pretty much every movie and TV show with high school kids, the actors are all 25 or older, so having a 22-year-old Daniel Radcliffe playing a 17-year-old Harry Potter won't be too troublesome. What will be annoying are all the idiotic reporters who don't realize this, and now have three more years to pester Radcliffe and company about how old they are.
3. They're destroying the book's arc in favor of cramming everything in.
Actually two related points here. The first: cramming everything in is good, right? We love all the minor characters and details! Right? No. There are books, and then there are movies. If you literally translated a 700-page novel to the screen, it would be the most boring thing ever. The goal is not to fit as much in as possible, but to keep the spine of the story and make it an exciting film. The second: when you do the adaptation, you have to make a movie work on its own terms. A movie only using the plot of the first half of a book usually won't work. Case in point: what will the climax of Part 1 be? There is no built-in climax in the book! J.K. Rowling saves that for the end, remember? This is an extreme example, but it's like slicing the Mona Lisa in half, enlarging each half so they're as big as the original painting was, and selling them each as complete works of art.
2. It won't look pretty on my DVD shelf.
I'm a fan of the Saturday Night Live "Best Of" compilations, and I own quite a few of them on DVD. They're all lined up nicely in a row, but standing out like a sore thumb is the Will Ferrell edition – because unlike the rest of them, he has two different "volumes." The same aesthetic travesty will now beset the Harry Potter series. (Okay...so I'm sometimes laughably obsessive-compulsive.)
1. The First Half of Deathly Hallows Drags Anyway.
The dirty little secret about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is that the first half of the book isn't that wonderful to begin with. It's easy to forget this, because the last two hundred pages are some of the most entertaining and memorable prose I've ever read – and I really mean that. But the first half, after a promising start, soon settles into an eternity of "hiding in the woods" sequences that seem to exist only to make the book take place over one year (in order to fit the format of the other books.) An eternity, let me again remind you, that has no climax.
And I haven't even gotten to the point that the first half of the book has no Hogwarts scenes. None. That's part of what makes the climax of the book so spectacular – we finally return to familiar territory for the mother of all showdowns. As it stands, the first Deathly Hallows films will be all set up with no payoff, while the second half will be all payoff with no setup. You have to have the films work individually. But why care about that when you can make money?
Michael Dance
StrandedinManhattan.com
**Read more articles by Michael Dance**
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