The 6th book is the best and the movie version of it coming out later this year will be the best and there is no need to continue.

And Caleb you and I think alike.

I don’t mind going to a 3 hour Harry Potter flick, but the greed isn’t all on the part of the studio. Any fan of the series that can seriously think, “I don’t want an extra Harry Potter movie” is crazy or at least missing the big picture. Who cares if the studio is thinking about capitalizing on this move? I’ve liked every film, they’ve all been good in their own right. In ways, each has improved upon the last. Sure, I’d rather see Alfonso Cuaron do it. I think it was always more likely that he would have done it than Guillermo Del Toro (besides, I’d rather see his Hobbit than Deathly Hallows). David Yates’ inexperience as a blockbuster director was evident with the last film, but still it stands among the best of the series.

By the time Deathly Hallows comes out he will have put out Half Blood Prince, which will benefit from Bruno Delbonnel’s cinematography. His style is pitch perfect for Harry Potter and I think his involvement will mean that visually HBP will resemble what I consider to be the best Harry Potter, at the very least in a visual sense, The Prisoner of Azkaban. It will also help set apart HBP from OOTP. Order had a great cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak, however, given his upward trend with recruiting better talent to work around him, plus with the actors’ (primarily I’m referring to the kids) increasingly better acting abilities, I think that any qualms about not having a better director than Yates (or at least that new fresh take we had grown accustomed to) should effectively be rendered obsolete.

Now, as to splitting it in two, which I don’t consider to be more relevant news than Yates’ return, I’ll again restate my opinion that more is more. I guarantee after finishing a single film version of Deathly Hallows, that any problems I’ve had with the adaptation (which has been the case with each film), I would have blamed on the fact that substance was cut out in favor of a reasonably timed movie, albeit not a very streamlined one. I also know I’d finish it, the same as with the book, sad and sentimental that there will most likely never be another Harry Potter film. In a sense, you could argue that I’ll be feeling the same way after finishing the eighth film. But all the same. I’ll still be walking out of the theater after having seen the eighth film of the franchise. Not the seventh. If you’re truly a fan of the books and/or the films you’ll be just as greedy as the suits for an extra film.

(Spoiler)
This brings us to the question, where is the best place in the story to split the narrative? If you ask me, I think that, though it is fairly far along into the story, ending Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One just after Harry, Hermione and Ron have broken out of Gringott’s on the back of a dragon would be an apt time to end it. Though a bit cliche, I can’t think of a more fitting place to pause than to have our heroes riding off into the sunset, though still with the worst, most dangerous part of the story to come. Granted, the Gringott’s sequence would make for a rousing first scene in the eighth film, but if you cut it before, you wouldn’t be doing the audience any favors, as they spend a lot of time preparing to break in. You’d just have to remind them in the beginning of the eighth film and in terms of story arcs, that planning time serves as a great lead in to the climax of the film. Pretty standard mode of scriptwriting, really.

So, that means that the first of the two parts would definitely be longer and have a lot more material to cover. A lot of the wandering/camping can be cut out for the film, however, and though I don’t have the book beside me, if I’m not mistaken, the Battle for Hogwarts does cover several hundred pages (is it two or three). Which also brings up another point. One of Deathly Hallows greatest strengths is that most of the story takes place away from the familiar settings of the school that the entire series has set up. Again, since the book is sentimental (every single character from the series that hasn’t been killed off makes a final appearance. And even then, that’s not entirely true) it would be great to have the final film take place almost exclusively at Hogwarts. The book sets it up perfectly by first breaking the mold, then kind of conforming back into it by the end.

(Spoiler)
So, yeah. Sorry, that’s long, but as any big fan would agree, all these ideas have merit. Oh, and I really don’t want them to put the epilogue into the last movie. I mean, it’s not that I didn’t like the prologue for what it was (come on, Harry gets everything he never had growing up!), but I just really don’t want to see Emma Watson try to act 19 years older. Not any of them, really. And to see other older actors playing them, well it wouldn’t feel like a proper farewell.
Anyhow….thoughts?

Yates will do a great job, but that isn’t the issue. So much of the fun of these movies is seeing how different directors deal with the stories, which are a perfect franchise to get a whole lot of insanely talented directors on board. So in that way, it sucks that Yates gets a full half of the franchise, but the movies will still be pretty good. He’s probably a really easy and fuss-free director for the stdio to work with, too.

consider the quality of the most recent Harry Potter movies. I don’t think either one of the movies are gonna suck. Lets just hope though that they don’t turn out like the Matrix.

I couldn’t agree more with redandjonny. Just leave some of the filler detail that was in Deathly Hallows out, and make it a little more than 3 hours, that way it’s ONE movie, and they add enough of the detail to make it relevant - something they didn’t do with GoF and OotP.

It does feel like a bit of a final “grab all the cash you can outta this…since the gravy train is coming to an end”

David Yates already signed on for the last two. And GDT is busy working on other projects at the moment as it is…