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Filmism.net Dispatch December 15, 2013

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In case you missed it, a few months back JK Rowling announced she was going to team up with Warner Bros to make more Harry Potter-themed movies using the characters, places and ideas from the Potter mythology. This is coming on the heels of the Pottermore.com website, which is your online home for all things Potter.

Now, if Rowling died tomorrow the influence she's already had on world culture in our time would be unmatched. And it's not like she didn't try to do something different – her adult novel The Casual Vacancy sold like hotcakes (but did that have more to do with her name than the book's content?)

I'm also not saying Rowling is exactly cursed with Harry Potter and he's a figure whose shadow she'll never escape. But she is going to be associated with the boy wizard and his friends and adventures long after our collective lifetimes, as are Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, no matter how well they manage their careers from now on (in the latter case, badly).

I'm just saying she needs to be careful. We can have too much of a good thing, and we already have a template for it in entertainment. Back in 1977, it seemed George Lucas was God after Star Wars. A few short decades later he was penning editorials whining about how much the internet hated him for everything since.

We know (even if George doesn't) that the reason he ended up so hated was because what had captured a generation – just like Harry Potter would 25 years later – became increasingly ridiculous. Sure there was a huge mythology to explore, but selling your company to Disney and getting JJ Abrams to do it is the right way to do it. Generating an increasingly asinine roll call of animated movies, animated shows, 3D re-releases, stage show musicals, Angry Birds tie ins isn't. And let's not even mention Jar Jar Binks.

He kept telling us he wanted to make small avant-garde movies like THX 1138, that it was the reason he got into the business. Instead, he's forever known as the overlord of a sweeping entertainment property that's now more of a laughing stock than anything.

So curate your world well, Joanne. And remember, even though today's kids (and twentysomethings) grew up with Potter, that doesn't mean they want all they can get. There'll come a day nobody will be as interested in this as you are, and it'll just look pathetic.

Get ready now for the day some publisher in 2030 convinces you to write a new Potter book depicting Ron, Hermoine and Harry all divorced and sitting around in some pub drinking cheap wine trying to remember the words of spells, and the kids of the day all laugh at the idea.

Meanwhile, I'm still not back to my former movie watching frequency, but I did wrestle with the two biggest heroines on screens right now. No matter how hard I try, I just can't enjoy The Hunger Games films, and it was while halfway through The Hunger Games: Catching Fire I realised why. I thought Carrie was much better, if only because it was well cast and didn't try to reinvent the wheel.

Jackasss Presents: Bad Grandpa was like an extended series of skits about the Bad Grandpa character with a lot of unnecessary plot in amongst them, and Now You See Me was a kinetic thriller so absorbed with its own sense of fun it forgot to fill in some galactic-scale plot holes.

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