20 Worst Moments In Wizarding World Movies
More painful than the Cruciatus Curse...
The Wizarding World franchise - consisting of the eight Harry Potter films and the two Fantastic Beasts spin-offs, with a third one on the way - is mostly very strong. The ten films are absolutely full of great acting, brilliant world-building, beautiful visuals, thrilling set-pieces and powerful drama.
Of course, there are issues as well - most prominently iffy adaptational decisions and frequently terrible editing - but for the most part this is a good series and terrible scenes are in fairly short supply. That being said, there are always exceptions.
Across the ten films, there are various badly-judged scenes that really do stick out like a sore thumb and often have quite a cringe-worthy vibe to them. As you'd expect, quite a few of them are from the franchise's two worst films - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald - but the other movies are far from exempt.
So, from unfunny jokes to badly-written subplots, from poor bits of writing to hit-or-miss child actors, here are the twenty worst movie moments in this otherwise strong franchise. Hopefully the upcoming third Fantastic Beasts film can avoid stooping to these lows...
20. The Quidditch World Cup Anticlimax - Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is arguably the greatest Harry Potter film of them all, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of terrible moments.
A good example is this thoroughly disappointing scene from the film's first act, in which Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and the Weasleys are at the Quidditch World Cup final.
This sequence is pretty exciting at first. There are great visuals all around and the moment where the teams fly in is spectacular, but then Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy), the Minister of Magic, opens the match and... that's it. It ends there and we don't see any of the final itself.
This was a thoroughly disappointing adaptational decision all around and not showing the match felt like a terrible missed opportunity.