Film Feature: Why Studios Need to Start Working on New Harry Potter Movies Right Away

Printer-friendly versionE-mail page to friendPDF version

3. IT CAN’T BE ALL ABOUT HARRY

This might go without saying, particularly after I called for the movies to ignore the book structure and ramp up the subplots, but I think any new Potter series, if it’s going to be about the larger Potter world, can’t just be told from Harry’s perspective.
As I mentioned, the world already knows the story of Harry Potter. No matter what, in future Potter movies, we will always know more than our lightning-scarred protagonist, and that’s OK. It doesn’t lessen Harry’s journey at all, in fact, it gives his struggles and the world he lives in considerable more texture and depth.

Going back to “Lord of the Rings” as an example, in a new animated Potter-verse film, Harry should be positioned like Frodo Baggins. Frodo’s story is the core of “LOTR”. His journey is the backbone of the narrative and his final confrontation on Mount Doom is the emotional climax of the films. But can you imagine his story without the stories of Sam, Aragorn, Gimli, or Legolas to support it? Frodo is the lynchpin of the story, but he, alone, is not the whole story. The same can be said for Harry Potter. While Harry holds up the narrative on his back, there are many, many other storylines intersecting with Harry’s, and, if a new Potter film series could find the proper way to embrace those stories, the result has the potential to be epic storytelling at its finest. With Harry as the core, you could create a network of intertwined stories – Ron, Hermione, Dumbledore, Sirius, Dobby, the Dursleys, the Malfoys, and so on – all with their own victories and tragedies and all slowly slouching towards that final last battle at Hogwarts. Imagine something less like “Star Wars” and more like “Lord of the Rings” mixed with “The Wire”. There’s that kind of depth in Rowling’s Potter novels, and opening up the film universe to the wizarding world BEYOND Harry could both drastically differentiate the movies from the Radcliffe films AND create a vital, creatively compelling reason to greenlight a return to Hogwarts.

***

So, that’s my proposal. It might be unrealistic. It has flaws, it has prejudices. Heck, it might work better as a TV series. But, the main point I wanted to make is – while the Daniel Radcliffe Harry Potter movies are expert pieces of filmmaking – we can’t let our respect and reverence for them make us ignore the untapped potential for continued tributes, adaptations, and storytelling in J.K. Rowling’s fantastic fictional universe.

That’d be such a Muggle thing to do.

By TOM BURNS
Staff Writer
HollywoodChicago.com
tom@hollywoodchicago.com