I know a lot of people who will want to bash me over the head for this little comment, but really, none of the Harry Potter film so far have done much for me. They’ve been ok for the most part, but the third one was just painful to watch and the other two were not bad… but nothing spectacular or special by any stretch of the imagination.
The fourth installment of the series is already in production, and now the fifth has named it’s director. The good folks over at Cinescape gives us this:
Director David Yates has been revealed as the director of HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, the fifth movie in the Warner Bros. franchise. The British director has made a name for himself on a number of made-for-television projects in his native land including the mini-series THE SINS and THE WAY WE LIVE NOW. He’s also directed episodes of SEX TRAFFIC and THE YOUNG VISITORS and is attached to helm a new version of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED starring Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany.
Just this week screenwriter Michael Goldenberg was announced as the new writer for the POTTER films. Producers David Heyman and Chris Columbus are still involved with shepherding the fantasy series and filming is slated to commence on HP5 sometime in the latter portion of 2005.
If I’m not mistaken, I believe each Potter film has made progressively less money than the one before (which is still a lot of money). I expect this trend to continue because people are picking up on the fact that they’re just pumping these movies out way too fast and progressively losing touch with the spirit of the books.
Having read the Harry Potter Books, I find that “The Prisoner of Azkaban” was the most butchered in translating to DVD. If we could sit through over 3 hours of “the Aviator” which made no sense whatsoever, we could have done with a bit more of Azkaban. If you hadn’t read the book, the DVD would have not made sense, i.e., why was the whomping will planted? Read the book, you will know…watch the DVD, not a clue. Lupin was almost a worse choice than the new Dumbledor. A small man, with longer greying hair, obviously young but showing the ravages of…., shabby robes, quiet. I’m sure that somewhere they could have gotten someone more like. I also think that if ANYONE is getting a big head, it may just be Ms. Rowling. Her later interviews are near nauseating in her arrogance.
I have always said that she may well snuff out Harry in the last book. Why? So no one could ever make a sequal using the name. I guess when you have more money than the Queen, you tend to lose sight of what you started out to do. I look forward to books 6 and seven, simply to see how it ends, but as far as going to a movie or buying another DVD, I’m not dead stupid…especially after hearing that Order of the Phoenix was to be jammed into a short movie. SOMEone thinks kids will watch anything and have a short attention span…so why belabour them with the book as they know it.
I dunno, the movies I think really have gone down hill. This whole Harry Potter Empire is starting to lose a few stones at the base. The movies (as many times cinematic randitions are) have comepletely lost touch with the original literature. I want to make that comment doubly hard on the third installment. This movie has taken more than a few artistic liberties. It was, for me, as well as quite a few other people I know nigh painful to watch. Character involvement had been muddled to the point that they no longer represented the pervious spirit of these “people.”
It was completely Hollywoodized. The Potter Empire is going to burn out pretty quick, as they mass produce products to customers that slowly lose interest in. This is a classic example of a franchise counting it’s eggs before they hatch.
Part of me thinks the reason the movies are failing is due to the actors that have gotten big heads and are working on personal agendas (I’m not saying all of them have, just some.) not to mention the fact that the talent gaps are imense with many of the younger actors/actresses. I think if they want to keep these movie deals afloat it’s time to let in some American actors or other foriegn ones. Imagine if LOTR had only let British actors in eh? They wouldn’t have gone nearly as far. I’m not saying that America has better actors, but you can’t just pull from one area, you eventually exhaust resources especially when there are such rigidly different characters. It’s time for the franchise to wake up.
Dear director,
When I saw the third harry potter movie I was a little disapointed with a few things. These are some of the things that are wrong. Dumbledore, the new one is totally wrong! He’s supposed to have clean fingernails, where fancy muroon robes like in the first and second movie (and the book,) have a white smooth beard. have clean fingernails, and act wiser. Next is the fat lady I liked the other one better! and the shruken head absuloutly horrible!!!!!! All my friends HATE the head! Don’t get me wrong I liked the rest you did a good job with buckbeak and the characters and every thing else. please just make dumbledore better Please! Please! Please!
The 3rd HP film was definitely something special, and it was clearly not seen as a waste of time for it’s artistically respected director Alfonso Cuaron. Cuaron nailed the tone of the books cold, with the muted sparkle of his color palette of greens, grays, silvers, blues and inky blacks, the vertiginous widescreen camerawork and baroque mise-en-scene, the backgrounds teeming with activity, the moving exchanges between Harry and his rotating circle of father-figures, the natural relationship he shares with his friends, the way that magic itself exists as an organic element of the action instead of as a stand-alone special effect as in the Columbus-directed atrocities. The voluminous detail in every frame of this film bespeaks the incredible merging of mundane and fantastic, the deep emotion with the absurd humor, the contradictions that make up life in your teens, a subject Cuaron clealry understands and remembers in all it’s thrilling, terrifying glory. As for Gilliam, Rowling herself begged for WB to hire him for the first film, and even went so far as to put together a petition to force WB’s hand in hiring him, but they wouldn’t hear of it, and she had already assigned approval of the director to the studio in her contract with them. Gilliam was willing to do it, but WB wasn’t willing to hire him. No director would be sacrificing their respect to work on this franchise. If you’ve read the books, you’d see what amazing movie material they make. As a film student, I can easily visualize every page of Rowling’s work on screen. Like Dickens, these books are BEGGING for major artists to render them on celluloid.
As for reader interest, really, the interest in Harry Potter has not waned in the least, hence the record 8,000,000 first run printing of Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix which sold out in less than a week, and the $800,000,000 worldwide box-office gross of The Prisoner of Azkaban, making it one of the top grossing films of all time. (And a great deal less money was spent on the marketing on this film than Dreamworks spent on Shrek 2, which, despite it’s killing at the US Box office, didn’t make anything at all near the same dent in the box office outside the US). HP has millions of adult fans and underage fans, and continues to attract new readers, so the idea that the series is becoming less popular because the first wave of child readers is growing up is bogus. Those growing kids, and their younger siblings, STILL want to know what happens to Harry at the end of Book 7, evidenced by the sheer number of websites devoted to the subject, run by people of ages mostly in the range of 15 to 25 years old, and the daily calls I get at work, (a bookstore), from 7 year olds, teenagers, and adults alike, asking when it’s coming out.
As far as the climax is concerned, no one knows what it will be. It’s funny to hear self-righteous pseudo-intellectuals proselitize on predictable endings, especially when these people have been wrong with all their predictions about this series along the way. The one offered here on this message board is ludicrous, as it’s ignorant of what the prophecy at the end of the last book states: that only 1 of them can live, and can only be killed by each other. Meaning that if Harry dies, Voldemort can live forever, which is his ultimate goal: immortality. The only predictable thing about the series’ end is that Harry will likely survive, but lose many people close to him along the way. (Rowling has mentioned too many times that Harry might die for intelligent people to be confused; if she’s unwilling to divulge relevant details about the future books to anyone, why would the constant refrain of Harry’s death at series’ end be trustworthy?). The series has thrived on it’s merging of the real with the mythological and magical, and an overzealous Christian martyrdom ending isn’t at all in keeping with what makes these books popular to such a wide array of people all over the world.
An established director who already has a quality rep doesn’t need to go anywhere near the Potter franchise, unless he’s hurting for cash. And it doesn’t sound like Gilliam needs the money.
The entire Potter series has gotten tiresome, and interest in it seems to be waning, as the kids who grew up on the books are growing older. At this rate, will WB even bother to make the last two in the series?
The whole series is leading up to the predictable climax when Harry will defeat his arch enemy by “dying” — sacrificing himself in a Jesus-like manner — in order to save all of wizardry. He’ll then become a mere Muggle. (Thus, wizardry = the “magic” of childhood = ghey.) The End.
I would much rather see Gilliam get his Don Quixote off the ground than him direct a Harry Potter film.
It does appear that they are going for a bargain-basement director for the 5th installment.
I’m rather happy that they are not going to tie up good directors making Harry Potter films (see also Jean-Pierre Jeunet who almost directed this chapter). Let the good directors make films that they are passionate about, not another Franchise entry.
Personally, I like it when a ‘good director’ cuts his teeth on a franchise and then goes on to bigger and better things. Examples nearly the entire Alien Franchise: David Fincher on Alien3, Jean-Pierre Jeunet on Alien: Ressurection. But also James Cameron on Piranah 2: The Spawning (who funnily enough, went on to make Aliens)
KuRt.
Nothing against this person but I would like to know what WB has against Terry Gilliam to direct a Potter film.
Even JK Rowling insisted that they meet with him when the series started as she wrote the books with his cinematic sensibility in mind.