Last Harry Potter Film To Be Released In Two Parts, Kill Bill Style

Ugh:

The final Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, will get the two-film treatment, simply named Part I and Part II. The two will be released six months apart; the first in November 2010 and then in May 2011. The franchise's producer David Heyman said J.K. Rowling's finale, published last year, is so packed with important details that "unlike every other book, you cannot remove elements of this book."

Milking the final installment for all its worth? You bet. And this will make for a bad movie, or, rather a bad pair of movies.

The other books were jam-packed with incident and nonsense (about 50/50) and they were able to reduce them down to 2:20 running times or so. The last book -- I'm hazy on this, but this is what I remember -- has an enormous amount of padding, a lot more than the sixth book. For three hundred pages it's basically the same sentence over and over: "Then they sat in the woods some more, and missed Hogwarts, and also that Old Gay Dude they used to hang out with, and Harry wondered about his wand, and his future, and the prophecy, and that asshole who supposed is not to be named but is named at least once ever two pages, and Hermione said something supportive and/or bratty and then something bad about Ron, whom she hated."

Some happens in the beginning, some happens through the long middle act, and of course then quite a bit happens in the last 100 pages or so. I don't really care about this movie all that much, but the films have always been on the edge of tedious, and padding this movie out long enough to make two complete movies is going to make it very, very tedious indeed.

Why even bother seeing Part I? Harry breaks his wand and his stupid owl dies. That's all you need to know.

posted by Ace at 06:35 PM

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