Thursday, March 13, 2008

Warner Brothers FINALLY Gets it RIght

Yes, at long last, the film making industry has heard me.

You may remember my famed review of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Poo), where I brought up the idea of doing with Harry Potter what studios had done previously with films like "the Matrix" and "Lord of the Rings", filming and making much much longer movies and splitting them into two or even three part releases.

It seems that the good old WB finally got the memo.

The last of the 7 films (Deathly Hallows) will be made into two films, to be released within short order of one another in 2010.

But seriously, why in the world did it take two additional sub-par films (one for sure in Order of the Phoenix, and undoubtedly a second in the forthcoming Half-Blood Prince) to get to this point. There is beyond enough movie worthy content in books 4-7 to make at least two films for each one, and really, the ones who would make out the best from having gone this route would have been the studio! Yes, they likely would have doubled their budget, but they also would have doubled their PROFIT - which we all know will consistently smash the budget numbers for this franchise. And then they wouldn't have to put up with whiny fans like me yibbering on about what rubbish they have made of the books (well, the last couple anyway, the first three were not bad at all).

I will say that Yates did do an OK job with Order of the Phoenix, it wasn't great, I'm not even sure it was good, but it wasn't Goblet of Poo either. It's been some time since I watched it - but nothing sticks out in my mind that was important in the books that didn't make it to the screen. And with a 900+ page book, I'd say that's an accomplishment, if nothing else. I will be interested to see how he handles Half-Blood Prince, as it will perhaps be the most challenging film to bring to the big screen.

2 comments:

Scott Pearce said...

Greg, just in case you forgot:

You're a dork.

Joel said...

Greg,
First off, I agree with Scott.
Also, I agree with you, but only to some extent. If they had started making two movies from each book, production time would have increased by at least 50 percent. They wouldn't increase double, because they could shoot at the same time, but post-production time would have almost doubled with that much extra footage. If they did that, Harry, Ron, and Hermione would be at least 25-30 years old once Deathly Hallows came out. They already don't really look all that believable as it is.
My two cents.
JP