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

The longest Harry Potter film is, bizarrely, The Chamber Of Secrets. The Philosopher's Stone is only ten minutes shorter. And while that inflated runtime in relation to book length may seem totally unnecessary, what's notable about Chris Columbus' two entries is how they aren't massively weakened by it; the extra time is used to set up the magical world and present all of the story's key details. The same is true about Alfonso Cuarón's The Prisoner Of Azkaban; it makes a few more concessions to the source, but the general idea is there.

When we get to The Goblet Of Fire, however, things begin to shift. The movie is less about the full story than it is the set-piece events, removing plentiful character beats in favour of spectacle; Mike Newell focused almost entirely on the Triwizard Tournement, ignoring anything else that wasn't directly linked to the plot tissue between them (the only lesson is the essential one with The Unforgivable Curses). David Yates only ramped it up; in The Order Of The Phoenix he spent ages on the battle in the Ministry, but skipped over the true meaning of the prophecy so swiftly its real meaning is lost, and The Half-Blood Prince cut out the widely viewed "interesting" stuff (those two are so important I'll look at them both in more detail later).

This problem was crystallised by The Deathly Hallows, which was split in two to allegedly better tell the story, but really only stretched out the basic plot, with no real embellishment of the characters or how they're developing.