Harry Potter and the Movie Franchise That Exists Solely to Make Money

This is hard. I love the books. I like seeing the movies because they remind me of the books. But in trying to remove myself from my Harry Potter loving biases I can't help but feel, for the third time, a little disappointed in what Hollywood has offered me.

The Harry Potter movies aren't great works of cinema. The Harry Potter film franchise exists solely as an ancilary market to the book franchise to make money. You'd be lying to yourself if you thought that these movies would be made if the books weren't a smashing success. Hollywood knows that an intelectual property like this will turn a profit without so much as a hint of effort on their part. They could release a vacation slideshow of one of their interns and slap a Harry Potter label on it people would still see it. But greed isn't the reason the movies are bad. Actually they're not bad at all. They're slightly above average and actually excel in a number of ways, but I'm getting off topic.

Fact of the matter is the scope of the stories told in the books far outweighs what a feature length film can hope to convey. And it's the filmmakers' fault for trying to fit as much from the book in a film as possible. It detracts from the thing that make narrative film work; the characters. Not fantastic special effects or plot twists that are placed conveniently in the telling of the story so that it makes sense in the end.

The third film, by Alfonso Cuarón, probably left more out of the book than any other, but it was also the best one so far because it was able to focus the story it was trying to tell. Like the first two movies, "The Goblet of Fire" is more an illustrated version of the book and not really much a film. You can't fault a movie for not being exactly like its source material. They are two different media, the books and films, and sometimes things need to be changed and sacraficed to reach an end. But in trying to please the book reading populace the making of what could have been a great movie was lost somewhere along the line, and the result is something that is only barely good. B-