Harry Potter: The Biggest Mistake Each Wizarding World Film Has Made
If only there was a spell to fix some of these....
The Wizarding World franchise might be almost 25 years old now, but it's not showing any signs of slowing down. Honestly, aside from Star Wars, it might just be the most beloved franchise in the world and that's more than understandable.
JK Rowling's books were tremendous and the film series, while weaker than the source material, was still an impressive achievement. It was a huge gamble to film all those movies back to back with the same actors, but Warner Bros pulled it off with flying colours and for the most part, the Wizarding World films are strong family movies.
Still, no franchise is perfect and not all of the films hit these heights. Additionally, issues such as bad child actors, iffy editing and hit-or-miss writing and directing have appeared occasionally across the films.
After the absolute disaster that was its most recent film, this franchise isn't in people's good books right now and in order for it to return to its former glory (and hopefully it will) in the upcoming third Fantastic Beasts film, these past mistakes must be avoided.
So, what is the biggest mistake each of the ten Wizarding World films has made? It's time to find out...
9. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone: The Ultra Safe, Copy-And-Paste Approach
The franchise's first film is a really nice fantasy flick and it is still good, but it's not actually ageing terribly well and is usually seen as one of lesser movies in the series. But why is this? After all, the story is great, the adult cast are magnificent and the world-building is unbelievable, so what's the issue?
Arguably, it's that the whole thing just plays it too safe and feels a bit flat. In terms of the script, it doesn't really do anything wrong exactly but it doesn't do anything particularly adventurous and the dialogue and character beats play out in a rather by-the-numbers fashion. Chris Columbus' direction is also rather uninteresting and that doesn't help either.
Essentially, this is a copy-and-paste version of the book which follows it beat for beat but lacks quite a bit of its humour and richness thanks to this unadventurous screenplay, which ensures that this blockbuster is definitely good but never quite becomes great.
The main child actors were really annoying back then too, although that's forgivable since they were very young when this was filmed and they got better as the films went on.