![]() ![]() You don’t need me to tell you how that turned out, but cinematically, the Potter franchise-starter was marked by its commercial caution: its imagination was safely limited, its storytelling by-the-book in all senses, its budget spent to yield more value than magic. Columbus’ film might not have had its follow-ups ready to go the way Jackson’s did, but its scene-setting narrative and ellipsis of an ending as good as promised them, pending the audience’s thumbs-up. For one thing, it shares either the credit or the blame with Christmas 2001’s other colossal fantasy-film event: Chris Columbus’ pedestrian but immediately obsession-inspiring Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first move in a more conservative strategy – only one film made at a time, at least to begin with – that nonetheless worked like gangbusters. It might be unfair to draw a straight causal line between Jackson’s project and the glumly corporatised franchise culture that overwhelms Hollywood cinema culture today. By 2001, we were fully accustomed to ubiquitous sequels, of course, though they largely feigned completeness in themselves each time the promise of future extensions and rehashes was left tacit, a sort of silent gentleman’s agreement between studios and paying viewers. A vast amount of blockbusters these days are but chapters in a larger narrative their fans are less preoccupied with endings than with closing-credit teases and hints for whatever’s coming next. Twenty years on, to a Generation Marvel audience, that shock might be hard to understand. ![]() ![]() Even for those of us forewarned of Peter Jackson’s bold three-film adaptation strategy, however, the limbo in which the first instalment left us was disorienting and exhilarating, like being woken abruptly from a still-escalating dream. ![]()
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