8 Filmmakers Who RUINED Their Movies By Explaining Them

5. J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter & Fantastic Beasts

Fantastic Beasts The Crimes Of Grindelwald Newt
Warner Bros.

Even as someone who's never really had any real emotional attachment to Harry Potter, it's impossible not to grimace whenever you hear what's going on with the series these days. Whether it's J.K. Rowling being awful on Twitter or the Fantastic Beasts films queerbaiting audiences regarding Dumbledore's relationship with Grindelwald, there's always something that's undermining those original books and films what feels like every other month.

Arguably the most ruinous contribution of Rowling's, however, is Pottermore. In January 2019, the website posted a bit of lore saying that, before Hogwarts had actual plumbing, wizards and witches simply used a vanishing spell to magic away the "evidence" whenever they relieved themselves on the spot.

Never mind the fact that toilets existed before modern plumbing, the students and teachers of Hogwarts simply magic'd their piss and excrement away "wherever they stood." As Insider pointed out in their article immediately after the Pottermore Tweet, this raises a whole host of disturbing questions, like, what did the younger students too when they hadn't been taught the vanishing spell? Where did the actual... waste go when it was disappeared? Further still, did these wizards look each other in the eye as they were having a wee in public? At what point did they decide this was just a really, awful, messed up thing to be doing?

Those answers, unsurprisingly, are still forthcoming.

[EP]

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.

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Josh has over 11 years of experience as a published writer, having worked nine of those years as a full-time content producer at WhatCulture. In that period he has created hundreds of articles, videos and podcast episodes for multiple WhatCulture channels, specialising in gaming, horror and film & TV. He now primarily works as a senior content producer and presenter on WhatCulture Gaming where he co-hosts the WhatCulture Gaming Podcast, a top 3 UK most listened to gaming podcast that he co-created in 2018. Over the years he has reviewed several high-profile gaming releases, covered industry events with on-site reporting, opined on breaking news, and even kicked off his interviewing career by chatting to childhood hero, Tommy Wiseau.