maybe have more villains besides Voldemort? After is'nt having Harry Potter alway fight Voldemort in every movie getting old and tired? Maybe change the main location/setting to someplace else besides the world of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?How would you improve the movies or the books?
the movies could be improved, the books couldn't. i love them the way they are. the movies could be better by being six hours long so i can watch everything that happens in the books. would you sit through six hours? i would.
The books are amazing as they are.
There are many villains- not just Voldemort! Bellatrix Lestrange, Fenrir Greyback, and all the other Death Eaters, to name a few.
Harry's struggle with Voldemort is the point of the book- without it, how would Jo emphasise their relationship?
And having Hogwarts as the main setting is a very convenient place to house all those midnight adventures and friendships.
Don't get me started on the movies.
Personally, I think Harry Potter is a near-perfect series in terms of the books, except the epilogue. The epilogue, in my opinion, was utter crap. It was WAY too butterflies-and-rainbows and frolicking-in-the-flowers for my tastes. I'm not saying that everyone should have exploded in a grotesque and gory manner, but everyone seemed so...unaffected by what had happened. Yes, I know it's been 19 years, but you'd think that being exposed to so much death and fear at a young-ish age would be more life-changing.
The movies though...so much was cut! I have no issues with the actors, but they should have left some things in that were cut. For instance, the bit in OotP with the locket was cut, so how on earth are they going to explain that come DH? And Dobby and Winky being cut from GoF was stupid. If they choose to show Dobby dying in DH, then his death won't be nearly as effective as in the book (I cried, and I didn't really cry at anyone else, except Fred) since he hadn't been seen in 5 movies. People would just be like, wtf, why's the random elf thing from CoS showing up again? If they don't show his death, then lots of the major emotional scenes will also be cut.
I also think they should have kept the Rita Skeeter is and Animagus plotline. It would have made OotP better (I found it way too fast moving compared to the book and the other movies).
I do love Harry Potter though, and I'm really sad that it's over. And also, I'm EXTREMELY pissed at the whole movie being pushed back almost a year deal.
Stupid WB.
The books are great as they are.
How would I improve the movies? Based on the last one, a stronger Scriptwriter and Director would be good.
If you're looking to put the existing characters into different locations and situations, there are any number of fan-fiction sites out there...
No , no
i grew up with the books , i love them and wouldn't change a thing, not even the epilogue. every time i read the epilogue i feel that it's not over and i feel better;p
the movies are horrid.
they are b. a. d. movies.
they cut so much out and totally twisted some of the characters and made them aggressive or dumb or did not include them at all.
and i know it is claimed that there are too many of them(characters) and they cost too much money but if not done correctly , then it shouldn't be done at all i think. it would certainly give back a lot more money! and ,HP fans don't mind a long-lasting movie..
how come Lord of the Rings was ok?
I think the Harry Potter series are great the way they are. they are coming out with a new little book that was talked about in the last Harry Potter book. thats coming out december 4th. if you want a movie with more villians, try watching a different kinda action/scary movie. cus harry potter is fine the way it is.
I doubt there is much! I love the Harry Potter books!
But I'm sure that people have what they don't like.
Having more villains than Voldemort? Well, there surely are! Greyback the werewolf, Wormtail, all the Death Eaters, Bellatrix Lestrange... I dunno about you, but I find Greyback much scarier than ole' Voldy. I'm sure there could be more.
The books are just amazing. I think that it makes it all the more interesting having only one villain with a lot of followers. Ring a bell.
The movies could be improved a lot on though. Stick to the book and make them into more than one movie like their doing with the last one.
Perfection can't be improved.
i'm trying to see how a multi-billion dollar franchise comes off as weak in your eyes. Rowlings hit a home run with this, just the way it is.
hmmm, i think the harry Potter series is just fine without you input.
1. Voldemort's status as the only villain is what makes him so scary. He wouldn't be nearly as effective if he was in a League of Justice style gang. Sure he has lots of followers, but no one comes close to his level of evil. Think about it, how many bad guys in lit, movies, or reality have equal partners? If you're the best of the bad, are you really gonna share power?
2. The Harry-Voldemort relationship is one of the most intriguing I've ever read, and every time they fight it gets deeper. Unfortunately, this doesn't play out on screen as well as it does in the books. Besides, they don't battle in every book, and each time the scenario is different.
3. At its most basic level, the series exists to tell the story of Harry's formative years, which take place at Hogwarts. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the school has many secret passages and rooms, its own forest and lake, and Hogsmeade is nearby.
Improvements for the books:
1. SS & COS were pretty much inconsequential. It obvious they were written before Jo realized what a phenomenon the series was. Nothing really important happened until POA, and even then the action for the main story didn't pick up until the end of GOF. OOtP was just too long and slow.
2. I would do almost anything for more Sirius-Snape interactions. Just thinking about the handshake at the end of GOF makes me laugh.
3. I know most readers hate that in the movie Neville gave Harry the gillyweed instead of Dobby, but I prefer the movie version. I think it was a good was to foreshadow Neville's status as the almost-Harry his later importance.
4. Through Dumbledore JKR spends a lot of time talking about how the choices we make matter more heritage, but in HBP we find out that Voldemort was basically born as evil incarnate. In the first 5 books, Jo makes strong points on the power of free will and a conscience, but in HBP she effectively reverses that line of thinking and it seems less likely that Voldemort chose his own path and more likely that he was set on it by the decisions made by Slytherin and the Gaunts before he was even born. If the series had even one person from Voldemort’s lineage who had redeeming qualities, then Jo would have made her point. But by having Voldemort be descended from nothing but bad people and then making him a cruel child, it’s hard to see him as capable of making the choice to be good.
5. The Elder wand allegiance thing needs to be explained better. Dumbledore had the Elder wand and its allegiance. Malfoy disarmed him with a Hawthorne but didn’t take the Elder wand, so Malfoy had the Hawthorne wand and the allegiance of both the Hawthorne and Elder wands, while the Elder Wand was buried with Dumbledore. Later, Harry disarms Malfoy of the Hawthorne wand and Voldemort stole the Elder wand from Dumbledore’s grave. So how did Harry get the allegiance of the Elder wand if he took the Hawthorne wand from Draco? Did Harry just say he had the Elder wand to distract Voldemort? Is it that every time someone is disarmed all wand alleged to them switch allegiance? Confused? ME TOO!
6. Harry should have used the Avada Kedavra curse on Voldemort. DH especially was about Harry growing up and making the right decisions to protect his world at any cost. I think Harry using Expelliarmus allows him to keep some kind of innocence about him. What’s the point of that? Growing up is about the loss of innocence, especially in Harry’s case.
7. Albus Severus…wtf? Why would you do that to your kid? To any kid? Snape did a great thing for Harry, and I’m sure Harry appreciated it, but of all the people who helped him and gave their lives for him, I don’t see Snape as the one Harry would single out to name his kid after. Snape’s my favorite character, but this was a bit much, even for me.
8. I know it’s Harry’s story, but it would have been nice to know how 3 reasonable people like Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff end up creating a school with a homicidal bigot like Slytherin.
The movies
1. SS and COS were pretty faithful to the books and good enough considering the trio’s ages. The third film was the best by far, despite not explaining the Marauders (which would have taken like 2 lines).
2. GOF was my least favorite of the films to date. Michael Gambon’s Dumbledore was an over the top game show announcer. I think this is less his fault and more the fault of the director because he was OK in POA and kick-a$$ at the Ministry in OOTP. I didn’t like that Wormtail called Voldemort by his name at the beginning, but I could get over that. What really ticked me off was that they didn’t include the chapter “The Parting of the Waysâ€. I think it may be the best chapter of the series and it completely set the tone for the rest of the books.
3. I liked the pace of OOtP as it was much faster than the dragging book. Bellatrix and Umbridge were excellent. I didn’t like that they changed the wording of the prophecy and didn’t reveal how it related to Neville. I HATED how they handled Snape’s worst memory. It made Snape look much more petty than he would have if they had showed Harry in his pensieve.
Okay, be warned, this is going to preeety long. I'm gonna go through each of the suggestions in the question, and then my own suggestions, for both movie and book.
1. Maybe have more villains besides Voldemort?
There is nothing wrong with having one big baddy. This isn't a superhero film, where it seems these days you're required BY LAW to have as many supervillains as your CGI team can produce. There are plenty of villains working under Voldemort, but why obscure things with having two dark forces? It's definitely enough to have the Dark Lord, and then Bellatrix, Wormtail, Greyback, etc. working under him.
2. Isn't have Harry always fight Voldemort in every movie getting old and tired?
It's called archetypes, my friend. In sagas such as this, the good guy fights the bad guy, and they both make it out alive to the next chapter of the saga. Also, Harry didn't fight Voldemort in the third film, nor will he in the sixth film. Actually, we'll hardly see adult Voldemort at all in HBP (if it ever comes out).
3. Maybe change the location to someplace else besides Hogwarts?
As well as being an action/adventure series, it's also a boarding school series, a genre more popular in England than over here. Having your story take place at a boarding school opens up all sorts of new and interesting possibilities, especially on the shipping side, as well as on the "secret passages" side. Also, Deathly Hallows is hardly at Hogwarts at all. Most of the book is the trio (sometimes the duo) camping. We only hear of Hogwarts happening until the end, at the Battle of Hogwarts.
Now, for the movies:
First and second: get a different director. They were pretty faithful to the books, actually, it's just that they could have been better movies, even with the exact same script.
Prisoner of Azkaban: Personally my favorite, because it was a very enjoyable movie. It established some great motifs, like the giant clocktower that was used to such great effect in OotP. They didn't explain the Marauders well enough, which is a pretty big complaint, but it was still definitely the best.
GoF: Almost everything. The left out so much, and they changed canon so much. Why did they replace Dobby's parts with Neville? And they totally made Karkaroff seem so much more like a badguy than they should have. They did that one shot with him sneaking up on the Goblet, that was never explained. Voldy looked cool, but so much great stuff was left out, or changed for no good reason.
OotP: Umbridge was fantastic. Everything that had to do with Umbridge was brilliant. The rest stunk. The climactic battle at the Ministry should have lasted a lot longer. And Sirius's death was messed up in more ways that can be counted. I thought they did Illegimency and Occlumency pretty well, but they messed up Snape's worst memory. Also, why did they make the longest book into the shortest movie?
Okay, as for what I would change to make the books better:
Let me start this off by saying that the books are wonderful as they are, and all problems with the series now really aren't that big a deal for me. But, the question was asked, so I'll answer it.
GET JO SOME DAMN MATH LESSONS.
Jo is never exactly sure with anything involving numbers. There's the missing 24 hours at the beginning of Philosopher's Stone, where Dumbledore waited a whole day before doing anything with Harry for some unexplained reason. There's the size of the Hogwarts' student body, which Jo has said is about 1,000, where it really is more like 200 to 300. Or the Tonks's pregnancy, which did not follow the normal rules of gestation AT ALL.
FOLLOW THROUGH ON YOUR OWN LESSONS
One of my biggest disappointments with DH was the lack of school unity, which was one of the big themes in the series up until that point. But no, Hogwarts survived just fine with every single Gryffindor, most Hufflepuffs, some Ravenclaws, and one Slytherin (Horace Slughorn). In the end, Slytherin was made out to truly be evil just for the sake of being evil - there was no bonding or binding of the houses.
NEVILLE AND LUNA NEED SOME SMOOCHIES
Just personally for me, it's Neville and Luna together for ever, but that's the angry shipper inside of me speaking.
SERIOUSLY, THOUGH, LUNA LONGBOTTOM ALL THE WAY
Stop that! At least there wasn't anything about them in canon, so we can choose to disregard what Jo said afterwards about Neville and Luna, and pretend they got married and lived happily ever after on a Crumple-Horned Snorcack reservation.
NEEDS MOAR EDATENG
Continuity Editing to be precise, more specifically, for the first few books. They got Cheryl McSomething to do the last few, but there are some typos in the first few books, like in the sorting when it says that the last person to get sorted would be Harry, and as he walks back from the Sorting, Zabini gets sorted. Or the fact that this alphabetical order for some reason has "Weasley" go before "Potter".
So, in conclusion, to answer the questioner's questions, No.
Changes to movies: Get a good director and KEEP IT (why did they get rid of Cuaron? Why?!); don't be afraid to make the movies 3 hours long; and redo Sirius's death scene.
Changes to books: Follow through on your own lessons and morals; Luna Longbottom; and NEEDZ MOAR EDATENG.
That's about it! If you actually slogged through this entire thing, my sincerest congratulations!
