Harry Potter has been a major pop culture phenomenon among both avid movie and book lovers. The Wizarding World boasts of a massive fandom and has only expanded over the years. But it can’t be denied that the Daniel Radcliffe movies lacked some fan-favorite elements from the novels. Out of all the movies, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is still considered a very debatable addition to the franchise due to this very reason. Even though the movie was a hit, it failed to make a mark among the audience.
The Harry Potter films are still considered to be one of the most renowned adaptations to date. But no matter how good they look together as a franchise, there are certain flaws and missing elements from the movies that have never stopped troubling the Potterheads.
Is Harry Potter 6 the weakest among all?
Nobody denies the difficulty in adapting an entire novel into a movie but certain factors have led fans to repeatedly complain about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. There are many in the fandom who prefer the initial movies in the franchise, but the audience reception for the sixth movie presents a large number of audiences having a distaste for it.
With a budget of $250 million, it is one of the most expensive movies ever and shares its position with movies like Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Panther 2, No Time to Die, and many others. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for its quality after the audience presented the movie with criticism and backlash. Similar to MCU’s Thor 4 which was also made on the same budget, the Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint starrer disappointed the audience.
Even after the fanbase and the franchise value helped the movie to amass a strong $934.5 million at the box office, it is still talked about for all the odd reasons. The masses didn’t find the creative decisions taken by the David Yates movie to be acceptable as they omitted some of the most interesting and appreciated moments from the novel. The funeral scene of Dumbledore being absent from the movie is one of the prime examples of it. Then the necessity of the additional burning of the Burrow scene in the movie is also questioned by the Potterheads.
Some of the fans even questioned J.K. Rowling how could she accept such on-screen changes. Now it will be interesting to watch if they can fulfill their promise of being outright faithful to the novels in the upcoming reboot series. But as of now, the reboot announcement has also sparked an internet debate due to several factors associated with the Wizarding World.
Does the Harry Potter franchise need a reboot?
No matter how many flaws we point out or how much the movies deviate at certain points from the novels, they are iconic and can never be replaced. Despite everything, the cast and the performances are etched in everyone’s minds. At this point, many wanted to explore the other lores of the universe that are yet to be explored. The Fantastic Beasts even started with a similar intention, but a series of bad decisions led the spin-off franchise to not have any impact on the viewers.
Recently, David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery also stated how their IPs like LoTR and Harry Potter are underutilized. As reported by The Wrap, he said:
“We haven’t done anything with Harry Potter for more than a decade. We haven’t done anything with Lord of the Rings.”
But this led him to come under the wrath of the netizens who believed that with the spin-off franchises being released for both LoTR and Harry Potter, they weren’t underused, rather the quality fell drastically. Several Potterheads are also uninterested in the reboot as they wanted projects on the other unexplored parts of the Wizarding World.
Also Read: “This doesn’t mean to just remake Harry Potter story into a TV show”: WB’s CEO David Zaslav Calling Harry Potter And Lord Of The Rings Underused Gets Nightmare Response From Fans
Surely, the internet will be on fire with discussions and theories once we get to know more details about the reboot series. But intriguing it will be to watch if the series can do something different than the movies and grasp the attention of both the veteran as well as the modern audience.
The Harry Potter movies can be streamed on Max.
Source: The Wrap / The Numbers
