10 Reasons The Harry Potter Movies Were A Massive Waste Of Potential

10. They Didn't Know How It Ended (And It Shows)

One of the smartest business decisions in the development of Harry Potter is also one of its most creatively stifling; J.K. Rowling's decision to allow the movies to start before the books were over. Producer David Heyman bought up the film rights to the book series in 1999, the same year The Prisoner Of Azkaban was published, and the first film came out when we only four novels deep.

This meant that the movies hit at the peak of Pottermania and pushed the hype to even more extreme levels - The Deathly Hallows was published in the same month as The Order Of The Phoenix opened in cinemas, an astute marketing decision - but also that they were flying blind, not sure where the story was going or what random bit of mythology worth including (Rowling only stepped in when they almost went majorly off course, such as when Kreacher was almost cut out of Phoenix). It didn't help that the author seemed to actually be trying to mess with the movies in later books - in The Order Of The Phoenix Fred and George bid farewell to Hogwarts with the help of Peeves, the poltergeist who'd been cut out of The Philosopher's Stone.

The problems this caused can be plainly seen when comparing the books to the film. There's several essential book moments - the mention of Grindlewald on Dumbledore's Chocolate Frog card, the building blocks of Snape's arc (Rickman knew, yes, but nobody else did), the recurring role Dobby plays across the series - that were deemed extraneous when making the earlier movies but came back to haunt the filmmakers later on, as well as plenty of points that feel out of place in retrospect.

Had they known where things were going, Heyman and his raft of directors could have neatly built things up as well as Rowling did in print, and, conversely, there'd have been less time spent on empty cul-de-sacs. If there's a single argument for remaking Harry Potter, it's this.