1 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001) —Chris Columbus

The first film in the franchise is a light-hearted fantasy feast for children. It starts with 11-year-old Harry finding out he is a wizard. He travels to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, befriends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, discovers his knack for Quidditch and has his first brush with Voldemort. The film’s success can be attributed largely to the cuteness quotient of the young Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson — enough to make you overlook the non-existent acting skills and poor special effects.

t2 rating: 7/10

2 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) — Chris Columbus

The cute trio return to Hogwarts for another year of magic and mayhem. The film, despite the sinister events — students petrified into statues, scary messages painted in blood, and voices ordering murder that only Harry can hear — retains a light-hearted feel. You can see the friendship between Harry, Ron and Hermione deepen as they work together to find the Chamber of Secrets and rescue Ron’s sister Ginny.

t2 rating: 7/10

3 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) — Alfonso Cuaron

Back after a gap of two years, with a new director at the helm, the third part of the franchise takes a giant leap from children’s fantasy into young adulthood. Cuaron does a brilliant job of translating the darker tone of the third book onto the screen. The trio, now lanky teenagers with slightly better acting skills, deliver convincing performances. Despite major deviations from the book, Cuaron turned out one of the best Potter movies.

t2 rating: 9/10

4 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) — Mike Newell

Harry’s fourth year in Hogwarts is an action-packed film of magical proportions where Harry, as a part of the Triwizard Tournament, has to evade fire-breathing dragons, rescue Ron from his underwater prison and witness Voldemort rise again. Newell continues with the dark treatment used by Cuaron in the previous film, which is in tune with the steadily increasing grimness of the boy wizard’s tale that culminates in the first death (Cedric Diggory) in the series.

t2 rating: 8/10

5 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) — David Yates

With yet another director at the helm, the fifth Harry Potter film is about anger, frustration, hope, loyalty and friendship. Harry is unable to convince the wizarding community that Voldemort has returned. Back in school, the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Dolores Umbridge, has taken a dislike to him and his friends. Rebellion takes several forms — from the formation of a secret group called Dumbledore’s Army to the flamboyant exit of Fred and George Weasley from the school. Death strikes closer to home this time with Harry’s godfather Sirius Black being killed.

t2 rating: 8.5/10

6 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) — David Yates

The film is a mush fest — Harry begins a romance with Ginny, Hermione becomes jealous of Ron’s relationship with Lavender Brown. When not romancing, Harry practises the art of keeping Voldemort out of his mind with Snape’s help. He also becomes a dab hand at potions, thanks to a book that belonged to the Half-Blood Prince. With Dumbledore, Harry discovers the existence of the Horcruxes and sets out to destroy them. He understands that his life at Hogwarts is over, when he helplessly watches Snape kill Dumbledore.

t2 rating: 6/10

7 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010) — David Yates

Yates continues to helm the franchise, with the new film seeing Harry, Hermione and Ron dropping out of Hogwarts to destroy the Horcruxes. Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves do a fantastic job of speeding up their tediously detailed journey. The narration of the Deathly Hallows story (by Xenophilius Lovegood instead of Hermione, as in the book), done through shadow puppetry is excellent. The film ends with Dobby (the house-elf) dying and Voldemort taking the Elder Wand from Dumbledore’s tomb.

t2 rating: 8.5/10

NOT ONLY HAS ROWLING’S STORY GROWN, OUR THREE HEROES — HARRY, HERMIONE AND RON — HAVE GROWN TOO. AND HOW! HERE’S TRACING THE LOOK OF DANIEL RADCLIFFE, EMMA WATSON AND RUPERT GRINT OVER THE SEVEN CHAPTERS. WHICH OF THEIR LOOKS DO YOU LIKE THE MOST AND WHY? tell t2@abp.in

DANIEL RADCLIFFE AS HARRY POTTER

The look of the tiny tot, the cutest among the three friends in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and the Chamber of Secrets, changed (along with the official Gryffindor robes) in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban — going from cute to hip. A year later, Daniel Radcliffe was the quintessential teenager with unkempt, shaggy hair and dishevelled clothes in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. By the time the next film instalment came around, Radcliffe had grown from a gangly teenager to a well-built young man with short hair — a look that he maintained for the next two films.

EMMA WATSON AS HERMIONE GRANGER

A bushy-haired, cute-as-a-button Emma Watson won over Harry Potter fans worldwide with the first two films — acting be damned! Then within a span of two years, Watson grew up with a vengeance. She looked great as a spunky teenager in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and beautiful in the Yule Ball gown in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. We saw a rebellious side to her in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and a soft one in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. And when she donned the red gown for Bill Weasley’s wedding, Watson was simply wow!

RUPERT GRINT AS RON WEASLEY

Ten years down the line, Rupert Grint still has the same expression he did when we first saw him on Platform 9 3/4 in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The most noticeable change in Grint’s on-screen persona has been his hair that went from scruffy in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to a leonine mane in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and then a shaggy mop in the next three films. His physical frame went from lanky to brawny between films four and seven, even as his character went from goofy to moody and broody.

The boy wizard’s story in print and on screen has always been about you you you

How the potter heads own the magic

Harry Potter’s final battle with Lord Voldemort will hit movie screens on July 15, but that young wizard has already scored a decisive victory where it counts: at the box office, on best-seller lists and in the crowded arena of fantasy-driven popular culture. J.K. Rowling, a single mother when she hatched a series of magical boarding-school novels, has ascended to an Oprah-like level of wealth and influence, while Harry, with more than $6 billion in tickets sold globally, has surpassed James Bond as the top-grossing movie-franchise hero.

Like the books, the Harry Potter movies have grown progressively darker and more complex, as the initially stark moral universe of good and evil became increasingly shaded by prickly, often confusing, questions of sex and death (including the death in 2002 of Richard Harris, the first Dumbledore, who was replaced by Michael Gambon). The books and movies have fed the imaginations of fans with a richly conceptualised, densely populated world of plucky school kids, giants, dragons, trolls and adult wizards, benign and malevolent, played by the cream of British acting. Meanwhile Harry, Hermione and Ron, as incarnated by Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, have grown up before our eyes.

“I was on the train when I suddenly had this basic idea of a boy who didn’t know who he was,” Rowling once said, explaining the genesis of her creation as lightning hit her and then Harry. In the years since, the books and movies along with all the toys, games and even a Harry Potter theme park have helped show us that in today’s multiple-platform media landscape, a movie is no longer necessarily an evening’s entertainment but, in the case of those who came of age with Harry, that of a lifetime.

Here we look at what has become a hugely profitable corporate brand, a fan-fuelled sensation and one of the biggest entertainment stories of the last decade.

Firing up the imagination

In anticipating the first Harry Potter film Anne Collins Smith, then an assistant professor at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, peered into her crystal ball and gave dark warning. “It will take a strong individual indeed to say, ‘No, that’s not what it looked like inside my head,’ and set the movie version aside,” Dr Smith said. Worse yet, “Those who see the movie before reading the books will never have the chance to make their own vision” to the point that “for many people it will replace their own imaginations.”

Many millions of movie tickets, innumerable fan sites, wizard rock bands and conferences later, it’s indisputable that for many if not most Harry Potter lovers the movies didn’t replace their imaginations but instead enlivened and even fired them up. On deviantart.com, for instance, you can download work from a database of thousands upon thousands of fan-generated images of Harry, his friends and enemies from the photorealistic to the broadly caricatured. Elsewhere there are dirty-girl Hermiones aplenty and surprisingly, er, friendly Harry and Draco liaisons.

After the runaway trans-Atlantic success of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in the late 1990s the appearance of each new Harry Potter novel was like the opening of a blockbuster movie, but more festive and less dutiful than such occasions tend to be. At midnight, bookstores across the land would be thronged with readers with wands and robes, round glasses and temporary lightning-bolt tattoos, and for the next few days, on every bus and park bench, everyone — schoolchildren, grandmothers, young adults with tattoos that were not temporary — would be reading the same thing. And then, as the movie versions started to come out, the scene would be repeated in the multiplexes.

This is not the first time a popular series of books has been turned into a successful series of movies, but the overlap between the literary and cinematic versions of the Potter cycle was unusual, and has proven influential.The triumph of the Potter model is reflected in the Twilight movies and also in the Swedish and soon-to-arrive American versions of Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, which tumbled into theatres while their sources were still jumping off the bookstore shelves. In this millennium, we like to take our stories serially and in multimedia packages. The Harry Potter movies built on the fervid public enthusiasm for the books and fed back into it, to the extent that it is not quite accurate to call the movies adaptations, or to pursue the usual arguments about what is lost and gained when stories make the transition from words on a page to images on a screen.

Remarkably large numbers of people were eager to experience the same stories twice (or more), and if some may have had a preference for Potter in prose over Potter in pictures or vice versa, it seems safe to conclude that the majority was happy to have both.

He Belongs to us

Before the Harry Potter movies started breaking the first of many records, it was perhaps easier to believe that mass culture is something consumers largely experienced top down, like the big infantilised blobs in Wall-E, unthinkingly gulping whatever they’re fed. Harry Potter fans have made it a lot tougher to sell that old-fashioned idea. They have found an astonishment of ways to express their love (and sometimes profit on that adoration) and also at times challenged the supremacy of Warner Brothers, the studio that owns the rights to the movies. From the start the studio had been fierce about protecting its property (in the case of Harry Potter condoms, you can’t blame it), but in the process it also stumbled.

One of its roadblocks was Heather Lawver, a Potterhead who at 14 created The Daily Prophet, a fake (now inactive) online school newspaper about all things Potter. A few years later Lawver herself became news when, in response to Warner Brothers’ ham-fisted and -headed bids to shut down fan Web sites, some run by children as young as 11 and 12, she helped start a boycott of Potter merchandise (known as PotterWar), a press-relations stroke of genius that threatened to derail the company’s strategy of global domination.

Faced with being cast as a bully on the eve of its latest potential gold mine Warner Brothers backed down as representatives insisted no harm was intended. Prof. Henry Jenkins of the University of California, an enthusiastic champion of fan power, has framed the fight in near-revolutionary terms, writing on his website that PotterWar “may have been the first successful movement of fans to challenge the rather blanket copyright assertions of the major media producers.”

Movie Vs book

If you asked a roomful of movie critics to name the best Harry Potter movie, the consensus choice would be Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), directed by Alfonso Cuaró. It was not only thematically more unsettling than the first two movies (both directed by Chris Columbus), but also visually stranger and more artful. Perhaps for that reason it is generally the least-liked movie among hard-core Potterites, which is to say those viewers whose devotion to the characters and the story trumps their interest in the art of cinema for its own sake. Critics have tended to assess each film on its own merits as an individual work, which is perfectly reasonable — it’s our job, after all — but also a bit beside the point, just as the demurrals of literary critics who find fault with Rowling’s prose style or sense of narrative economy are both right and fundamentally out of touch.

From the start the appeal of the Potter cycle has been its generous dispensation of narrative pleasure. You might find a particular instalment or character or series of incidents especially exciting or vaguely disappointing, but you would not be fully satisfied until the whole thing was complete, until you had plumbed the mystery of Harry Potter’s origins and witnessed the resolution of his fate.

The bigger universe

More than a decade after the end of PotterWar, the ideology if perhaps not the utopian spirit of media consumers asserting their voices has become business as usual for media companies, which insist it’s all about you you you and not them them them. It’s inspiring when fans like Lawver assert that they too have a claim on favourite books and movies. The idea that media consumers may one day be able to siphon media power for our own purposes, as Professor Jenkins has suggested (if we can get around those pesky copyright laws), remains open to debate. As is the idea that cultural production is now a free-flowing two-way street because today’s fans, armed with laptops and social media, can appropriate mass culture in a more immersive fashion (i.e., online).

The truth is that culture has never strictly been a one-way street, even in the pre-Internet dark ages. For instance, back in Hollywood’s golden age stars could be deemed box-office poison by the front office because audiences voted each time they bought a ticket. It may be that instead of real choices, consumers now have just a lot of choices: thousands of television channels instead of a handful, and an entire Harry Potter media universe instead of a few rippingly good books and movies.

The staggered appearance of novels and films seems, in retrospect, to have been calculated, with almost diabolical brilliance, to maximise the audience. The first cadre of 9-year-olds who read Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets were primed to line up for the film adaptations of those books, as the movies prepared new readers for the fourth book, Goblet of Fire, and so on. Young people — those born after 1990 — were the vanguard and the core audience, and even if Harry had not also appealed to their parents, grandparents and older siblings, the Potter fan base represents a fairly significant sample of the world’s population.

And what has Harry given them? The movies have provided a showcase for the art of acting. Some great professionals — Alan Rickman, Imelda Staunton, Maggie Smith, David Thewlis and so on and so on — have demonstrated both high seriousness and a fine sense of play, and Ralph Fiennes has proven that it can be done without a nose. And we have watched potential movie stars of the future blossom before our eyes. More generally, and perhaps more profoundly, we have immersed ourselves in a world of grave danger and relentless evil that is make-believe enough not to bleed into our own messy Muggle reality. The adults in the audience have slid back into the breathless, compulsive readerly absorption (and cinematic enthrallment) of childhood, while our children have, with equal breathlessness, leaned forward into the complexity and exhilaration of growing up. We can all feel, under the spell of these stories, as if we were in full possession of our powers.

A.. Scott & Manohla Dargis
(New York Times News Service)

Fan speak

Niharika Chatterjee, class XII, La Martiniere School for Girls

I remember I was the first in my class to have read Harry Potter, in 1997. I was so excited about this world of magic that the book brought to life. When the first film came out we all trooped to New Empire (no multiplexes then) and all my friends were drooling over Daniel Radcliffe! That the whole Potter franchise will finally come to a close is saddening, because we all have grown up with the books and the films. But what is most disconcerting is that we will no longer have a yearly and much-anticipated dose of the four-eyed wizard with a lightening scar to look forward to. It had become a habit for us… something guaranteed to be present on our July calendar. It is going to be weird, next year onwards.

Aniket Mitra, Institute of Engineering and Management

I was 11, the same age as Harry, when the first Harry Potter book came out and I have been hooked ever since. I have grown up with Harry. I have memories of playing Harry Potter hangman with friends, going for the films with them. In fact, I have never missed a single film. With this final instalment of Deathly Hallows, an era of my life will come to a close. Hence, I have decided to make an occasion out of it. Two of my fellow Potter fans, who were my accomplices in all forms of Potter mania now study outside Calcutta. They have come down to the city and we are planning to catch the film together, just like old times. It will be a fitting finale.

Suha Gangopadhyay, St. Xavier’s College

I am extremely possessive about each of the books and films. I am not allowed to forget even the minutest detail about the plot or the characters. Even today I go back and read the books time and again. So knowing that it is all ending makes me nostalgic, though I am very excited about the latest film. The thing I am going to miss the most is the wait. The anticipation, the hunting for news about what is going to happen next, the trivia… was as much part of the fun as the release of the books and the movies themselves, and I have been doing this since the age of five. I will really miss not having another Potter instalment to look forward to.

Are you the biggest Harry Potter fan? Prove it in 100 words and write to t2@abp.in