Interlude: HP7
Apparently the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movie will be split in two parts. Not sure how this makes sense; if there is one book (other than the first two) that could be condensed into one movie, it’s book seven. After all, it’s fairly straightforward: find Horcruxes, with a lot of pointless running around in the process. And they do this after cutting out large parts of the previous books? The mind boggles. =/
Metalcynic said,
July 16, 2009 @ 1:45 am
A problem that’s pretty common with authors after a certain level of popularity is that their editors simply stop doing any editing. Steven King is the worst offender of the lot: he went from writing tightly plotted page turners like Salem’s Lot or Firestarter to dropping Telephone Books like The Wastelands that meander all over creation without any plot in sight! There is a section in the book The Tommyknockers that is literally the entire life story of a character that is just about to die (whom you’ve only just been introduced to) and who has no relevance to the rest of the book whatsoever other than that she dies and thats a bad thing…cause now she’s dead …or something. You could have cut nearly 100 pages of exposition from the book and lost absolutely NOTHING of any relevance to the plot!
In the case of Deathly Hallows there is an interminable section where the two of them are wandering around aimlessly in the Tardis-tent which could have been easily covered in a 2 min long montage in a film … instead we’ll doubtless get every tedious page committed to celluloid for one very simple reason: MONEY.
Recall that this is the LAST movie in the franchise and that there will therefor be no more golden eggs from this particular goose: one long movie is the same ticket price as a much shorter flick; but if you can stretch things out over TWO movies, why, you’ve just doubled your payday without adding that much more to your overhead (it’s massively less expensive to film two or, as is the current post LOTRs/Pirates fashion, three movies with the same actors, sets, cgi depts, ect).
This has nothing to do with being true to the books; it has to do with milking the fans for every last cent.
Matt said,
July 16, 2009 @ 10:32 am
There are several significant discrete chunks that will take a not-insignificant amount of time. And that’s ignoring the wandering in the woods.
Leaving the Dursleys’
The Wedding
Finding out where the Horcrux went
Breaking into the Ministry of Magic
Visiting Godric’s Hollow
Destruction of the first Horcrux
Meeting Luna’s father – Explaining the Hallows
Potterwatch/Capture
Escape from Malfoy Mansion
Horcruxes or Hallows
Breaking into Gringott’s
Returning to Hogsmeade/Hogwarts
Finding the Horcrux at Hogwarts
Big Battle #1
Harry vs Voldemort #1
Explaining some key things as well as summarizing the series
Big Battle #2
Harry vs Voldemort #2
Epilogue
Many of those will be nearly impossible to do in under 20 minutes. 180 minutes would be the bare minimum, and it wouldn’t do a lot of it justice.
necaris said,
July 17, 2009 @ 11:39 am
I’m with Metalcynic on this — as has been pointed out elsewhere, once they started to make money they became all about making money by releasing brick-heavy volumes and stretching out the film franchise to milk people of what few cents they have left.