Comic Con 2016 continues to deliver huge trailers with the second full look at the next installment in the Wizarding World: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Set 100 years before Harry Potter in America, this trailer really gives the first good look at what Beasts is going to deliver. The period feel really comes through, and if Rowling can write screenplays as well as her Potter books, we’ll have a treat this fall. Beasts will release November 18, 2016.
I like the existing Harry Potter movies, but its seems like they were made with little communication between Rowling and the filmmakers. I know that’s not the case, and that she was intimately involved, but I always thought the screenplays were unfocused, filled with material that was included solely as fan service, eating up time that could have been better spent fleshing the stories out elsewhere. Rowling’s plotting is elaborate and dense, and even if the filmmakers had really tried to streamline and prioritize, they still would have had a hard time of it.
But Rowling, writing an original script… this is going to be GREAT.
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Well, I have to disagree on the Potter series. With the exception of the sixth film, which also needed to be split (unlike all the unnecessary splitting that followed in other franchises) I thought they were elegant adaptations of extraordinarily complex novels. I like the firm time and place feel in this trailer and Colin Farrell’s character certainly looks intriguing.
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I would definitely not call the scripts elegant. I thought the movies were excellent, and could have been so much better. It must have been a Herculean effort to pare the books down while also making sure the diehards were happy, and I sympathize with the filmmakers’ position. But l always point to LOTR, which was a much better streamlining of a beloved literary work. The filmmakers weren’t even afraid to get rid of Tom, even though the knew the nerds would be unhappy.
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HP chopped a lot more than Tom. They cut hundreds of pages of plot out of the last four books. And, unlike, LOTR (which you know is my favorite film), they did it under the gun with a cast that had to be filmed while age appropriate. It was a decade-long feat to bring those books to the screen and, no, they’re not perfect masterpieces, but the fifth movie is better than the fifth book, and the third is pretty close. Unfortunately, the time pressures at the end didn’t allow them to give Half-Blood Prince the treatment it deserved and that, in my opinion, is the best book in the series. Book 8 (screenplay, but still considered book 8) is out July 31st.
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Half-Blood Prince is my favorite too. I said something that sounded flippant in my first comment. I implied that the filmmakers did not take care in trying to bring the books to the screen in a way that captured their essence, and that is wrong. My feeling is simply that they were in a perilous place, caught between fan service (which is not always bad) and an attempt to wrestle the books into a filmable form. And as we know the books are both sprawling and tightly plotted. It’s not like a Stephen King adaptation, where you can easily take out a chunk of 300 pages, and it’s instantly obvious which pages need to go. I understand that the filmmakers tried as hard as they could. It’s probably for the best that the studio did not take J.K.’s advice and hire Terry Gilliam, BTW. His films are many things, but “streamlined” is not one of them.
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