Reflections from Harry Potter Franchise Director: The Major Hurdle of Splitting Deathly Hallows into Two Parts
After reigniting a popular trend in young adult adaptations, director David Yates returns to the biggest challenge of dividing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows into two parts. The seventh and final novel in the iconic fantasy series by J.K. Rowling hit the screen in 2010 and 2011, Yates and the creative team behind the previous adaptations chose to divide the book into parts. This plan worked in their favor because Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 and Part 2 were critical and commercial successes, the latter being Warner Bros.’ highest-grossing film. to Barbie. During a recent interview with Collider for the Netflix thriller Pain Hustlers, David Yates reflected on his time in the Wizarding World franchise. When asked about the challenges in putting his movies together, having helmed seven to this date, the director specifically looked to the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movies, recalling the challenge of crafting a satisfying two-part split for Rowling’s final novel. See what Yates explained below:
Oh, that’s a good question. Probably [Harry Potter and the] Deathly Hallows: Part One, which is one of the Potter movies. The big challenge with this movie is that it doesn’t have a third act. It kind of ran out of steam halfway through, and Mark [Day] and I used to sit there figuring it out and say, “This movie doesn’t have a third act. How are we doing…? Wait, this is crazy. There is no third act. These two movies, part one and part two, the idea is that the first part is a road movie about taking kids out of school, putting them in danger outside this safe place and witnessing how they grow up and their lives. The relationship is tested. But then we go straight to the climax and fireworks until the finale. So we cut the first part into parts to try to make it feel like the last part of the movie had an escalation when really it was about Jazz Hands. [Laughs] Not much happens at the end of the second half of the movie, and I say that in a very lighthearted way. People still say to me, “My favorite movie is Hallows: Part One, man.” It was unbelievable. It’s like a European street movie. And I said, “Yeah, but the work we did to edit it was amazing.”
Why Deathly Hallows Remains The Best Two-Part Movie Split
After a successful release, many studios will follow WB’s strategy by splitting the latest installments of their YA series into two parts. At the same time, Summit Entertainment also achieved similar commercial success when it decided to split The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn into two films, both of which grossed a total of $1.561 billion despite poor reviews. Lionsgate tried to do the same with The Hunger Games: Mockingjay and The Divergent Series: Allegiant, although the former had the lowest box office for its franchise while the latter was cancelled, leading to cancel the second part. While Breaking Dawn’s 700+ pages of source material makes a better argument for splitting its plot in two, the remaining installments found themselves criticized even by fans of their respective books due to the fact that their stories are short enough to be grouped together in one movie. Deathly Hallows sits well above its competitors when it comes to book length, with the first edition clocking in at over 600 pages. The other major benefit the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallowsmovies had was a natural place in the books in which to split up the story, ending Part 1 right as Dobby was killed by Bellatrix and Voldemort successfully retrieved the Elder Wand. This allowed for Part 2 to continue to expand on the character arcs put in place by both its predecessor and the entire franchise before it, but to also deliver a properly satisfying conclusion to the movies audiences had fallen in love with across a whole decade.