[COLUMN] The Harry Potter Films Already Felt Like a Television Show | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

This week, there were some big announcements about Warner Bros.’ upcoming television adaptation of the Harry Potter novels, with Succession veterans Francesca Gardiner and Mark Mylod announced as showrunner and main director. It seems like as good an opportunity as any to take a look back at the Harry Potter franchise, and the often overlooked ways in which those eight films radically reinvented Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking.

The Harry Potter franchise is often somewhat overshadowed by those big blockbuster series around it. It launched the same year as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. That synergy prompted a lot of discussion about the arrival of fantasy in mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, and even some anxiety among critics that mainstream crowd-pleasing cinema was drifting away from anything even superficially reflecting real-world concerns.

Still, Lord of the Rings achieved a prestige that eluded the Harry Potter franchise, most obviously with the Oscar sweep by Return of the King. At the other end of the series, the Harry Potter franchise was eclipsed by the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU), which would go on to become the highest-grossing film franchise of all-time. However, there’s no denying that the Harry Potter films rebuilt Hollywood in their own image.

This is true in a number of superficial ways. It’s easy, for example, to point to the wave of young adult genre adaptations that were commissioned in the franchise’s wake as other studios fumbled to capitalize on the same audience. There were obvious success stories like Twilight and The Hunger Games, but then there were also forgotten attempts like Disney’s Narnia and Percy Jackson franchise, films like Eragon, Alex Rider: Stormbreaker, The Golden Compass, Seventh Son and countless more.

In a broader sense, the decision to split Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows into two blockbuster films had a lasting impact. This is most obvious with the final books in the Twilight and Hunger Games (and even Allegiant) franchises, but it runs deeper. Avengers: Infinity War was announced as a two-part film. Recently, Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of IT and Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune were each split into two gigantic blockbusters.

Still, the legacy of the Harry Potter film franchise extends beyond the young adult space and studios’ urge to stretch out content to ensure the greatest financial reward. Stylistically, the Harry Potter films have a very clear influence on the superhero films that followed. While “the Snap” in Avengers: Infinity War is lifted from the source material, the execution of “the dusting” feels very strongly inspired by Voldemort’s (Ralph Fiennes) death.

The Harry Potter films may also have influenced Warner Bros.’ DC Extended Universe franchise. The Harry Potter movies embraced a grim bleached out aesthetic and a slow march towards a brutal climax packed with Christian iconography, and were lauded for it. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince even features Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and Draco (Tom Felton) having a bloody knock-down brawl in a desaturated men’s room.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 also helped end the 3D fad that took off after the success of Avatar. This movement produced some wonderful films from filmmakers who embraced the potential of the format, but it also produced cynical cash-ins through cheap and ill-judged post-conversions. Clash of the Titans and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 are often cited as examples of films that killed the audience’s interest in 3D.

However, the films’ influence runs deeper than that. Today, it’s common to talk about long-running blockbuster film franchises as if they are television shows that only release episodes intermittently and those episodes cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. The MCU is the posterchild for this discourse, described by Emily St. James as “the world's most expensive TV show” and by Joanna Robinson as “the most popular TV show of the decade.”

This is true in a number of different ways, particularly the kinds of directors who make these movies. Joss Whedon directed one theatrical film before The Avengers, but was still best known as one of the defining auteurs of turn-of-the-millennium television. Before directing Captain America: The Winter Soldier – and later Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame – the Russo Brothers were best known for their work on the sitcom Community.

Even experienced directors working on Marvel properties acknowledge that they don’t exert the same control that directors traditionally hold over movie production. “It is a Kevin Feige production, it’s his movie,” Nia DaCosta stated of her work on The Marvels. “So I think you live in that reality, but I tried to go in with the knowledge that some of you is going to take a back seat.” It’s very similar to how directors work in television, where Marcos Siega argues they are often seen as “traffic cops.”

Revisiting the Harry Potter franchise, one can see this shift happen in real time around the middle of the series. Christopher Columbus directed Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in a style informed by the Amblin movies of the 1980s and 1990s. It makes sense that Steven Spielberg was offered the chance to direct the first film.

However, the third film was directed by Alfonso Cuarón, who would go on to win four Oscars – two for directing. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is handily the best film in the franchise, and it’s not even particularly close. The film has a distinct style and perspective. It’s filled with memorable imagery. For the first time in the series, Hogwarts appears truly magical, reintroduced with a gothic choir singing Double Double Toil and Trouble.

Even today, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban stands apart from the rest of the films around it. It looks better, in large part thanks to the collaboration between Cuarón and cinematographer Michael Seresin, who would go on to work with Matt Reeves on both Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes, two other franchise blockbusters that just look gorgeous. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is inventive, playful, atmospheric and moody. It’s great.

The film was the product of a time where major studios like Warner Bros. entrusted major franchises to interesting young filmmakers. A large part of the success of the Lord of the Rings films, and perhaps why they enjoyed greater credibility than the Harry Potter franchise, was down to the unique sensibility of Peter Jackson. A year after Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Christopher Nolan would get to put his mark on the Caped Crusader with Batman Begins.

However, it’s worth acknowledging that not everybody was happy with Cuarón’s work on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The film is contentious in fan circles, often criticized for not being sufficiently faithful to the source material – as if that is some measure of quality. Ultimately, those fans would get their wish. None of the subsequent Harry Potter films would come close to embracing the same wonder and majesty that made Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban so compelling.

Mike Newell would direct Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but the real shift in the series happened with the fifth movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The production team turned to David Yates as director. Yates was a relatively inexperienced filmmaker, but was a veteran of British television. He had directed beloved and important British miniseries like State of Play and Sex Traffic, along with the achingly earnest television film The Girl in the Café.

Yates would go on to become the franchise’s in-house director. He would direct the final four Harry Potter films and the three Fantastic Beasts spin-offs. His various attempts to establish himself as a filmmaker outside the franchise inevitably ended in failure, with the largely forgotten The Legend of Tarzan, the Netflix streaming movie Pain Hustlers and an ill-fated attempt to direct a Doctor Who movie that makes the influences on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them even more obvious.

Yates’ Harry Potter movies are generally competent. However, his arrival into the franchise does signal a shift in the general atmosphere in Hollywood, away from the idea of the visionary auteur towards the “safe pair of hands” caretaker. Nearly the past two decades of Yates’ career have essentially been dedicated to the director serving as groundskeeper for a single multibillion-dollar franchise, rather than as an expression of his own interests as a filmmaker.

The Harry Potter franchise feels more like a television show than a blockbuster film franchise. Part of that was baked in from the start. Warner Bros. were clear in their intention, even before the first film released, to adapt all the books, rather than following the traditional cinematic model of waiting to see how a movie performs to commission a sequel. Filming second-unit material for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets began three weeks before Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone opened.

This signaled a sea-change how blockbuster franchises were made. Initially, studios were cautious. Warners and Disney waited to see how The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean performed before commissioning sets of back-to-back sequels. Of course, the Lord of the Rings movies were obviously also a factor in those two cases; those pitches were finite and director-driven. In contrast, there is a straight line connecting Warner Bros. commitment to adopt at least the five Harry Potter novels that had been published at that moment to modern PowerPoint presentations laying out decades of movies in given franchises.

Even the structure of the series came to resemble television, particularly in the home stretch. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is essentially the penultimate episode of a season of prestige television, largely an excuse to move props and characters around the board for the grand finale. Then Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 represent the big, bombastic, two-part season (and series) finale.

The Harry Potter franchise provided a glimpse into the future of Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking, one that more blended the production and narrative styles of television with the scale and spectacle of cinema. In this sense, the Harry Potter television show seems somewhat ironic, and perhaps a little redundant.