Harry Potter

Bringing a book to a movie screen is not an easy task to do, you have to count with very good scriptwriters and a group of producers and directors that agree with the project. Having that statement into account, things can be more complicated if the project is to bring into the screen a book that has become a worldwide phenomenon, that book is the series of J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter.

The first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone, was published in 1997 in the UK and the last one, the seventh one, called: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was published in 2007. Among both we can find other titles as Harry Potter and: “the Chamber of Secrets”, “the Prisioner of Azkaban”, “the Goblet of Fire”, “the Order of the Phoenix” and “the Half-Blood Prince”. Each book has a movie, with the exception of the last one which has been divided into two different parts. These novels have broken records all around the world: 400 millions of copies sold, translated into 69 languages, reaching 200 countries, the last book is the fastest selling book of all time, $7 743 849 053 is more less the box office receipts, etc. As we can see, it has not been easy for producers, scriptwriters and directors to please every single fan of the saga when making the films.

From the moment Warner Bros. decided to start the project of making the Harry Potter movies, J.K. Rowling has been always there to help the producers and to express her opinion about what was going on in the pre-production.  The majority of the films had been adapted by Steve Kloves, with the exception of the fifth movie that was adapted by Michael Goldenberg. Kloves and Rowling have had a good-work relationship and the author has always had good words about Steve’s work. Nevertheless, talking about the fidelity of the scripts we can find people from both sides of opinion. Every movie is different, we cannot deny that the first one was the most faithful one but also it was the shortest book, so it was easy to make the script. But the next ones were not that easy to adapt to a script so the producers and the scriptwriters decided to focus the movies from the point of view of the main character: Harry, as an example we can talk about the fourth movie: “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” which has 636 pages in the UK, this book it is not the longest one but it has a lot of detail and Rowling introduces a lot of background-situations. Introducing those “secondary stories” into the movie was impossible, so the movie just shows the main points of the book which are the four tasks Harry must overcome in the Triwizard Tournament; this movie was criticized by fans but in our opinion it was a good option to make in order to film a more dynamic movie that maintains the essence of the book, which is the objective of the script. 

In our opinion all the critics that have surrounded the phenomenon from the moment the movies started are nonsense because we considered that sometimes fans are quite excessive in their thoughts and they don’t understand how hard is to adapt such dense books into the screen because you can’t make a movie that lasts five hours just because you want every single detail. So as we see it, the fans phenomenon sometimes can disturb the work of the scriptwriters and when that happen, you just need the support of the author of the novels, if he is agree, you don’t have to worry. And that is the case of Harry Potter movies that J.K. Rowling has always been agree about what the movies show because she is aware of the difficulties of adapting her books and even more, sometimes she has congratulated the producers because they have introduced new elements that fit perfectly in the Harry Potter world, for example in the third movie Alfonso Cuarón introduced what in Spanish is called “cabezas reducidas” and the author expressed in an interview that she hope she would had introduced that element in the novels. 


In order to show you how the movie can change, we are going to upload you a video showing a scene from the book and the same one for the movie.