Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by Ben » November 18th, 2021, 4:51 am

Okay, after having the book of the script thing unread one shelf fo past few years, I finally took a look at what the plot of this Cursed Child was, and…what else was anyone expecting?

Potter, like so many things nowadays, was always a distillation of many multiple elements, the redeeming nature of JK's books was that she picked her sources quite well, hid all the borrowing nicely, and wrapped it up in enough new flash and sparkle so as to wow enough people at the right time and create something that, deservedly, made its mark. None of the Potters were particularly well written, but they captured a moment, spoke to people in the right way at the right time, and that’s how (genuine) successes are made.

So, then, how to keep that going? Well the two ways are either prequels or sequels, as we know. And the prequels were already in the pipeline with the Beasts series — not instigated by her but by property sharing Warners, who wanted more films. So when someone comes to you with a shed-full of moolah and says "we want to do Potter on stage, any ideas?", and she’s already knee-deep in a prequel, then obviously the "easy way out" is to do "the next chapter" of what she'd already written at the end of the last book.

But…that was a story self-contained and completed within itself. Otherwise, one just keeps on writing Harry Potter, Son Of Potter, Harry Potter's Grandkids Go On A Magical Adventure, My Great-Grandaddy Was Harry Potter, etc, forever and ever and the whole thing just becomes a soap opera as opposed to the initial seven-and-done series she outlined way back when, and had previously completed as intended.

So *anything* coming after this, whether it be from JK directly or via another collaborator, such as Steve Kloves on the Beasts films, is a bolt-on. Like anything after Return Of The Jedi (and, arguably, even after the first Star Wars '77), it’s all about marketing and making money. Rowling's outline and story was told after seven books and eight films. That’s why that coda is there in both: to set up but not laboriously have to pay off the promise that, yes, life goes on past the end of the story.

But…in all likelihood, nothing actually happens in that story, once Harry sends Albus off on the train. The threat has gone. Life is normal. There is no story left.

So, desperation sets in. They need to come up with something, because someone wants to sink loads into a stage play. So with the prequel route already being mapped out, your options are rather limited to either either rehashing and repeating what came before, or trying to spice up what comes next, the problem being that what comes next, in "real" terms, is pretty boring and non-eventful.

It’s telling that the story opens with the same scene as closes the books/films, as clearly JK has no other story to fall back on. She's told her lot on this, so the obvious thing is to just go on with Son Of Potter but, somewhere along the line, in attempting to escape the rehash, it has become a *literal* rehash, in going back to the original books, which probably felt fresh and new and amazing at the time.

But then she relinquished authorship to her collaborators in the play, and this is maybe where her voice has been lost and the perception of "fan fiction" has crept in, since other voices, possibly treading too carefully, possibly trying to make their own mark, have somewhat taken over. And, as we know, everyone has their own take on where things "should" go, or how cool it would be to do this or that, and then get so confused with the backstory that the new version fails to notice it could all actually be quite simply fixed without further going down the rabbit hole.

But then you’d have no story, so in the desperation of wanting it to be totally different and yet exactly the same, you end up with a "watered down" endeavour of sorts.

But, then, it was never really going to be anything else. Was it? :)

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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by Daniel » December 6th, 2021, 11:27 am

This premiered on November 28:



It was alright but not enough to continue watching.

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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by Daniel » December 9th, 2021, 3:53 pm

First look at the reunion special:


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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by Ben » December 9th, 2021, 4:51 pm

Looks like they shot this at the Leavesden Studios exhibit. Definitely seems to use the "sets" that the tour attraction makes a big deal about, which is fair enough. Quite cool that they all went back to where it was all filmed.

After Friends, and now Potter, what’s the odds on another Warners franchise reunion in another twelve months? It can’t be The Matrix, as we've got the big screen equivalent next week already, and they’ve kind of shot themselves in the foot on LOTR with the lackluster recent 4K box, so…um…maybe…the Ocean's trilogy cast get pulled back together one last time…? Or would that just be too cool for school…? Either that or Austin Powers comes out of retirement; I don’t think Ace Ventura would cut it… ;)

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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by gaastra » December 13th, 2021, 10:46 am


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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by Daniel » December 13th, 2021, 3:27 pm

Looks so colorless, drab and lifeless. "Fantastic Beasts" on the title is so tiny and almost disappears with that color! They seem to be introducing like five new characters while half the originals are barely featured. Meh.

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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by Dacey » December 13th, 2021, 10:38 pm

Between Depp being (wrongly) fired, and J.K. Rowling digging her own grave on Twitter, it kind of puts a damper on this whole thing. :(


And I say that as someone who enjoyed the last two films.
"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift--that is why it's called the present."

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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by Ben » December 14th, 2021, 6:29 am

Two things: I hope that they show why Grindelwald again looks different, which won’t be hard to explain as he's been Colin Farrell and Johnny Depp, but it needs addressing as opposed to just being a re-cast, since he woulda/shoulda been sporting the same shock-white hair and not just looking like Mads Mikkelsen on a normal day. And: I hope that Redmayne just hurried up and gets out of the way of these films with his stupid, hushed, fake-humble non-performance. This is the classic sidekick-character-being-given-their-own-film problem, when that character (not exactly a "sidekick", but still a footnote in the wider original Potter canon) can’t actually sustain the weight of anything more than what they were designed for in the first place. I mean, the first film wasn’t even about fantastic beasts (or even where to find them, since they had already all been found) and has almost immediately morphed for any original idea into being a Hogwarts prequel in which Newt seems to be increasingly sidelined (as he should be, in my opinion) as a character with no personality, and a one-note actor who has done his slightly bent-head thing and can’t bring any more shades to a badly underwritten portrayal. Ouch, but true!

I wonder if there is any truth to the rumours I am hearing out of the studio that — hush, hush — the next film *may* actually wrap things up sooner than expected, before WB do their wanting-to-jump-ahead thing and go all Justice League by putting the brakes on Fantastic Beasts (which has largely been a disappointment to them, and swirled with controversies and production issues that has seen this series sour and become far from the well-oiled machine Potter was) and leaping to their much-more coveted Cursed Child two-parter for 2025/26. That’s the word, anyway, depending on how well or not this does next April…

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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by EricJ » December 15th, 2021, 3:00 pm

Dacey wrote:
December 13th, 2021, 10:38 pm
Between Depp being (wrongly) fired, and J.K. Rowling digging her own grave on Twitter, it kind of puts a damper on this whole thing. :(
And I say that as someone who enjoyed the last two films.
I'd compare Fantastic-era JK to some of the looney hijinks that George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry got up to once they realized they were Cult Creators, and threw the rest of their creativity away to cultivate the universe of their own creation, but...that would be an insult to Lucas and Roddenberry. :(

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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by Daniel » December 17th, 2021, 3:34 pm

Reunion poster:

Image

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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by Ben » December 21st, 2021, 8:33 am

Full trailer:



For those in the UK, Sky is showing this also on New Year's Day, and a couple more times during that week, as per their HBO deal. :)

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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by Daniel » December 22nd, 2021, 2:46 pm

Looks hopeful.

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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by Daniel » March 23rd, 2022, 3:06 pm

The Secrets of Dumbledore second trailer:



Looks okay, but not feeling any hype.

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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by EricJ » March 23rd, 2022, 4:14 pm

Like most of the population, I missed the second movie: WHY is Fat Comedy-Relief American Guy Named Kowalski (representative of JK's British view that American New Yorkers still dress and talk like Al Capone and Lina Lamont, just like in those 30's movies on the telly) still in the series?

Apart from Warner not wanting to "confuse" us by not having franchise characters come back, that is...No, really, was there some reason they had to un-wipe his memory from the end of the first movie?

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Re: Harry Potter and the Wizarding World

Post by Ben » March 23rd, 2022, 5:23 pm

I have seen the second one (our neighbour brought it around to watch)…have no recollection of it (other than it being confused, tedious and boring)…and have no intention of trying to remember (and I don’t want my mind un-wiped either)…!

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