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

Unlike the books, which are incredibly tightly constructed, there's very little cohesion between the movies. It couldn't really be helped given when the films were conceived (the idea of cohesion between movies, something we now take for granted, wasn't as strong), but there's no avoiding how extreme and distracting it is; The Philosophers Stone and The Deathly Hallows - Part 2 could be part of different franchises. And this goes well beyond the tone changing as the characters grow up.

Yes, by having most of the same cast (although not all - see the Fat Lady, Lavender Brown and several other notable recasts, as well as the unavoidable Dumbledore switch) you get to see them grow and mature across the films, but the world they're in is incredibly inconsistent. In the early films, Hogwarts looks different year-to-year and where it fits in the landscape fluctuates wildly (things normalise about the time of The Order Of The Phoenix), which means when we get to later events the castle is still a pretty unknown place, serving only as a generic backdrop. The lore is also rather iffy, especially spells - the effect of Expelliarmus varies depending on film, although that's nothing on the introduction of wordless incantations.

The original plan was to do a movie year and have the actors age in full real-time (rather than slightly ahead of their screen counterparts, which becomes noticeable around Goblet Of Fire, especially with Daniel Radcliffe), but filmmaking concerns made that foolhardy. Had this been followed through, however, perhaps things might have lined up a little more.