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Top 9 Annoying Changes in the Harry Potter Movies


Harry Potter fandom is experiencing something of a rebirth right now. The Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movie is on its way, as is the sequel play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.  It’s safe to say that nobody intends to give up on the HP gravy train any time soon.

It may be that someday, we’ll even see a reboot movie series, especially with how reboot-happy the movie industry is these days. In the event that a reboot ever does come, I’ve decided to compile my least favorite changes the Harry Potter movies made from the books in a plea for them not to be repeated.

I enjoyed the movies just fine, but like any nerd, I like nitpicking over changes to the source material on occasion. I’d love for people to talk in the comments about their least favorite changes, or even talk about how they felt any of the changes I listed were actually positive. Let’s get the Harry Potter discussion rolling!

  1. Ron Weasley's Transformation into a Bumbling Fool

    The impression of Ron as “dorky”  and “dumb” still persists around the Harry Potter fandom, despite the fact in the books he’s portrayed as no less intelligent that Harry and, though he is someone who’s poor (not something he can help or should be shamed for) and also fairly insecure, he’s not particularly loserly.  Most of his “comedy moments” are deliberately delivered deadpan comments like “Oh, of course, I forgot we'll be hunting down Voldemort in a mobile library”.  He’s a snarker, not a fool.

    Though not as bright as Hermione or “the Chosen One” like Harry, he’s shown to very quick-thinking, perceptive and good with strategy, as demonstrated by his victory in a magical chess match and ability to advise Hermione even while being strangled by a murderous plant.

    The impression of Ron as bumbling and stupid comes pretty much entirely from the movies. The movies seemed to go out of the way to remove most of Ron’s good points in favor of portraying him as ineffectual. In Prisoner of Azkaban, he stood up on a broken leg to defend Harry from what they thought was a dangerous killer, saying “if you want to kill Harry, you’ll have to kill us first!” In the movie version, this line was given to Hermione, while Ron whimpered in the corner. In addition, instead of Hermione losing her head when they were strangled by plants in the first movie, Ron lost it.

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    Ron in the Harry Potter moviesWarner Bros. 

    Rather than have Ron’s comedy come from his snarkiness, the movies had it come from him bumbling around- he was often portrayed as pathetic and silly. Most damningly, being stupid also apparently also meant being less supportive of his friends. In PoA, when Snape insults Hermione in front of the class, Ron yells at Snape and defends her, even though he knew he'd get detention for it. In the movie, he agrees with his hated teacher, despite the fact Hermione is visibly hurt.

    Harry and Ron’s friendship in the movies is not portrayed as being as close as it is in the books- it’s perhaps illustrated at the end of the Half Blood Prince movie. In the book version, Ron is right there with Hermione, offering his support to his friend. In the movie, he’s literally sitting off in the corner silently while Harry and Hermione do all the talking. This…just perfectly symbolizes how he’s treated in the movies.

  2. Hermione Granger's Transformation into a Flawless Goddess

    Part of Ron’s diminished role in the movies is due to giving a lot of his “cool” moments to Hermione. Steve Kloves has stated Hermione was his favorite character, so that may have been his motive in giving Hermione all of Ron’s good traits in addition to all her other abundant talents. Which does a disservice to Hermione’s characters in addition to Ron, in my opinion. “But Caitlin!” those reading this familiar with me might say. “ You’re so into cool female characters! Why would you complain about Hermione being a goddess?” Well, like Melissa Anelli, I kind of like that book Hermione is a human being with flaws and stuff, who makes mistakes like everyone else.

    Book Hermione was still a genius who kicked ass, but she also prone to anxiety and panicking under pressure, uptight and overly self-righteous at times and pretty insecure- all things I can really relate to. What’s more, we got to see her develop past a lot of these flaws. As the books went on, she unwound a bit, became more secure, moderated her self righteousness and learned not to buckle under pressure.

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    Hermione in the Harry Potter movies, Warner Bros.

    A great illustration of this is in the first book, when she panics and forgets briefly she can do magic, Ron cries “are you a witch or not?”. In the last book, he’s the one who briefly panics and she boomerangs his words back at him “are you a wizard or what?” It really shows how far she’s come. That sort of a character development is both impressive and inspiring for people who identify with her. But you don’t get that kind of growth in the movies because she was great at everything from the start.

  3. Ginny Weasley and the Case of the Missing Personality

    Another bit of trivia about the screenwriter Steve Kloves is he really wanted Harry and Hermione to get together. So much so I sometimes wonder if he was the one who convinced J.K. Rowling she made a mistake in not pairing them up. That’s neither here nor there, but it is a probable explanation to why the movie’s versions of Harry and Ginny had all the chemistry of two dead fish. A lot of people tend to blame Bonnie Wright for that, but the girl couldn’t do much when she had nothing to work with.  

    In the books, Ginny was a fiery jock who (likely in response to being taken advantage of at a very young age) took no crap from anyone and had a biting sense of humor. She called Harry out in when he threw tantrums (a memorable scene in the fifth book is when she reminds him he’s not the only one who’s had Voldemort inside his head) and teased her brother mercilessly. The first kiss between her and Harry was appropriately dramatic, in front of a room full of people when Ginny won a Quidditch match in Harry’s place.

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    Ginny and Harry in the Harry Potter movies, Warner Bros.

    In the movies, Ginny’s personality is nowhere to be seen. Their flirting is weird, half hearted stuff like Ginny…tying Harry’s shoe…and their first kiss is some out-of-nowhere two second deal in the Room of Requirement.  Book Ginny was a controversial figure in fandom, mostly for the crime of dating two whole boys before hooking up with Harry (the horror) but she certainly wasn’t the piece of deadwood she comes off as in the movies.

  4. Harry Potter Loses his Snark

    In the books, Harry James Potter was kind of the master of darkly sarcastic remarks and I adored it. His sarcasm was way more aggressive and cutting compared to Ron’s more lighthearted snark, which suits their respective characters perfectly. While Ron used humor in a sort of self-deprecating attempt to stand out when he felt overlooked, Harry’s was often a defense mechanism against the increasingly ridiculous drama of his life.

     Whether it was replying “I expect Voldemort’s just a walk in the park compared to you three” in response to Malfoy and his cronies, “Wow, I wonder what it’s like to have a difficult life” or my personal favorite, “well, it changes every day you see” when Uncle Vernon asked him why he was watching the news. Harry Potter had his teenage sass on lock. There were a couple moments in the movies, but Harry’s sardonic side didn’t get nearly as much play as I would have liked.

  5. The Marauders Go Bye Bye

    A lot of people really liked the Prisoner of Azkaban movie, but it honestly was never one of my favorites. It was where the dumbing down of Ron started going off the rails, Werewolf Lupin looked silly and mostly, the movie seemed more interested in doing quirky scenes with the Whomping Willow and whatnot than digging into really important plot points. Like the fact that Harry’s dad, Lupin, Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew were the Marauders who created the map Harry uses and their general backstory. This was kind of something the entire plot hinged on and would have taken only a few minutes to go into, but I guess they assumed everyone had read the books. 

  6. Dumbledore's Famous Freakout

    Thanks to how often it’s been posted on Tumblr, this is one I include more for being amusing than annoying. In the books, Dumbledore asks Harry if he put his name in the Goblet of Fire calmly. In the movie, he flies at Harry in an inexplicable frothing rage, slamming Harry against the wall which screaming incoherently. You have to wonder if the old man took some hard drugs that day or something.

  7. The Vanishing of the Horcruxes and Voldemort’s Backstory

    The Half-Blood Prince is definitely my least favorite Harry Potter movie. Rather than even explaining where and what the Horcruxes were and learning about Voldemort’s past, the actual plot of the books, the movie instead tried to be a quirky teen romantic comedy that mostly fell really flat for me. Ron’s temporary girlfriend, Lavender Brown, was amped up from a somewhat clingy, but otherwise normal girl to an over-the-top unhinged stalker-lite and it was more annoying than hilarious.

    I really wanted to see more of those scenes from Voldemort’s disturbing past on the big screen. I wanted to see  his slow transformation into the monster we came to know in the present play out in those visits to Dumbledore’s memories and I wanted to hear more about the whole deal where you can destroy your soul to become immortal. But apparently, guffawing over those silly teenage girls was more important.

     

  8. Lily's Story Sacrificed for Snape's Manpain

    If you went by the movies, you’d think that Snape was just a poor lamb who just got dumped by Lily. But the seventh book paints a far more fascinating picture, showing a Snape who was misguided, bullied boy repeatedly ignoring his friend Lily’s discomfort with him hanging around with bad people (who were committed to literal hate group that wanted to wipe her out). Lily finally snaps when he calls her the wizarding equivalent of a racial slur and explains she can’t be his friend when he’s going down this road.

    But rather than show Lily’s side of the story at all, the movie instead chooses slowly to focus on showing how sad Snape was over Lily dumping him and Lily’s death (which the books let you know he indirectly caused). It’s 100% “poor Snape” because why show a complex situation where a boy descends further into a hate group at the cost of his only friend when we can reduce it to an unfairly jilted Nice Guy sadly cradling a woman’s corpse as her infant son cries alone in the background?

  9. Voldemort Dies and Turns into Confetti

    In the final Harry Potter book, when Voldemort died he specifically “hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken”. The message is clear- for all of his delusions of grandeur and ideas of being a mystical being better than others, Voldemort was simply Tom Riddle, a man like any other, and his death is a pathetic one.

    The movies completely missed that moral and instead had Voldemort's death be so epic and otherworldly he shriveled into…ash? Confetti? Newspaper clippings? Well, whatever it was, it was a bizarre, overly dramatic death that completely missed Rowling’s point that Voldemort was ultimately a shriveled, self-important human, not the god he tried to be. 

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