The story claims that the decision is based on creative reasons and not financial ones. With the Harry Potter books coming in longer and longer (the first one was only 223 pages while “Deathly Hallows” is 776 pages long) it has become increasingly difficult for filmmakers to fit all the story fans expect into each film. Rowling herself has stated on her website, “It is simply impossible to incorporate every storyline into a film under four hours long.”
The article claims that employees and workers on the sixth film, “Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince,” were told the news over the weekend.
At Warner Bros, who are rumured to be thinking of Oscars and a big-name director such as Steven Spielberg for the final film, a spokesman said: “People are discussing all possibilities.”
I have not read the book, but I expect that if the studio can get two decent scripts out of the one book and Rowling will support it, the act of splitting it into two movies is a no brainer. Each film in the series grosses upwards of $750M to $1B worldwide so the return on investment would be absolutely huge considering they would likely film both movies at the same time. It would seem unlikely that fans would complain either as they would get to see more of the book on film and enjoy an additional movie that they didn’t expect. It’s a win-win for pretty much everyone involved.
Of course, it’s possible that the thought never even occurred to them until they read the article. That would be something that wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.
If writers could fit a Tolkien into 3 hours decently, you can’t tell me that a Rowling is deserving of 4 hours. That said, when something is only of a limited size and you know it brings in a huge ROI, people are going to milk it for all it’s worth.
Let’s hope this doesn’t become a theme for most popular books over 600 pages in length
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For real. Of course, knowing Hollywood, they would decide that if you could turn a 600 page book into two successful films why not go ahead and make it a trilogy… Now that would suck.
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