I’m on the record as saying that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows probably doesn’t need to be cut in half, as Warner Bros is doing. Just condense all the fucking camping. Half the book reads like an ad for Eastern Mountain Sports as Harry, Ron and Hermione screw around (figuratively) in the woods. I like JK Rowling and her books, but this decision was not a narrative triumph. Seriously, like 200 pages of the book take place while the kids are hiding out in the woods.
But Warner Bros, wanting to get as much out of one of the most successful franchises ever, has decided that Book 7 should become Movies 7 and 8. Empire Online sat down with producer David Heyman and star Daniel Radcliffe and asked them just where the split might come.
“We’ve played around with a couple of places,” said Heyman, “and
ultimately settled on a place that we think is very exciting, and I
think quite bold, in that it’s not necessarily where one might
expect. You want to give a sense of completion, on one hand, but a
sense that there’s another piece, more to come. We tried one and then
Steve (Kloves, screenwriter) came up with the idea to try it another
way and when we tried that, it felt just right.”
Potter fansite The Leaky Cauldron thinks that the split will come during a visit to Luna Lovegood’s dad’s place, where our heroes are ambushed by Death Eaters. That seems a mite early, as there’s a truly dark, tense scene right after that, where one of our heroes is captured and another character dies heroically.
Meanwhile, Heyman says that they hope to use some Benjamin Button technology (ie com pew tars!) for the epilogue. There are spoilers here: the final chapter of the book has grown up Ron, Hermione, Harry and Ginny sending their own kids off to Hogwarts, and Heyman wants the real cast to play the roles, not some adult actors who look like our kids.