It’s Official! ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ Will Be Two Films – Cinematical:
Posted Mar 12th 2008 6:46PM by Elisabeth Rappe

After months of speculation, Warner Bros has revealed to the L.A. Times that they plan to split the final Harry Potter book into two films. One will be released in November 2010, the second in May 2011, and will simply be titled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I / Part II.

Overall, I’m a little bit let down by this. I would rather see a four hour MONSTER film than have to wait a year and two months for the final moments. I know four hour movies are hard to sell and a bit longer than comfortable, and not good for ticket sales, but if they simply had an intermission, I’d gladly go to that. I’d even pay extra for it. The LoTR movies were easily 3 hours, and some were even a bit longer, iirc. This is a special case in movie making history, and I’m certain that fans would stick it out.

Aware that this looks like a grubby money-maker by cynics (myself included), Daniel Radcliffe insists that’s not so. “I think it’s the only way you can do it without cutting out a huge portion of the book. There have been compartmentalized subplots in the other books that have made them easier to cut — although those cuts were still to the horror of some fans — but the seventh book doesn’t really have any subplots. It’s one driving, pounding story from the word go.”

Good point, and well-received, but I think it’s an even stronger argument for my four-hour point. I know they don’t want to cut anything, but a 14 month interlude is pretty damaging.

I do admire that they are so dedicated to giving us the complete Deathly Hallows story [, so much so] that it wears down my cynicism. I disagree that there aren’t things that couldn’t be trimmed down — Harry, Hermione and Ron’s months upon months of hiding out in a tent, for one. But the fact that it was such an edge-of-the-seat read makes me worry they’ll lose that momentum by splitting it in half. And what of the age factor? Will Radcliffe look 35 by the time this is finished?

I completely agree w/ the whole camping business. It dragged on for me in the book, though it built a decent sense of dreary, isolated solitude for the trio. I’m not really certain it’s necessary, because the remainder of the story has enough flavor of it’s own to carry itself — readers don’t really need the appetizer to set it up. The huge year-long disconnect in the middle is going to seem like an eternity. I know they said that this wasn’t a money-grab, but when you look at the disruptive nature of the break, it becomes all too clear that Cash Rules Everything Around Me.

Dolla dolla bill, y’all.