A-List: Top Five Movie Franchises
By J. Don Birnam
May 7, 2015
1. The Harry Potter Series
Were it not for the crappy Clones, Star Wars may have landed the top spot on my list. Instead, another movie series driven in no small part by a powerful John Williams score takes the spot.
The eight Harry Potter movies make up my favorite film franchise of all time. Note, first, that there is not a false note in any of the movies. Some are better than others, but all are good. This should not be particularly surprising given some of the names that Warner Bros. obtained to helm the movies. Chris Columbus was perfectly selected to direct the first two entries - more innocent and childish by nature, right up Columbus’ alley; Alfonso Cuarón then took over for the transitional Azkaban movie, and David Yates directed the complex and pivotal Goblet of Fire. The rest is history.
Impressive, too, is the cast of respectable characters that made appearances in the series. From Alan Rickman in his exact portrayal of Snape, to Maggie Smith as the stone-faced Professor McGonagall, to Emma Thompson, Robbie Coltrane, Michael Gambon, Imelda Staunton, Helena-Bonham Carter, Gary Oldman, and Ralph Fiennes, it is hard to find a single actor who did not pull his or her weight entirely. The series is simply an enjoyable spectacle of acting to behold.
It’s also amazing that the people behind the movies managed to find three young actors who aged well into their roles and who agreed to stay on - remember that they only signed up for four movies to start.
Commercially, of course, the movies were phenomenal box office hits. As we saw last week, the first movie opened to box office records, and all eight occupy top fields in all-time lists.
To me, however, the bottom line value of the Harry Potter franchise lies in the fact that the people behind it achieved something truly extraordinary: they took a known quantity, a beloved book franchise, and turned it into a smash, worldwide success movie series. Don’t take this for granted. By the time the first Harry Potter movie was released in 2001, four of the seven books had been widely read. People had opinions about how the characters/places/people should look, be, and behave. To turn that into a setting that most fans were satisfied with (and there are a lot of Harry Potter fans) was a gargantuan task. If you don’t buy it, ask the people who unsuccessfully tried to adapt the Golden Compass or the Narnia series. It doesn’t always work out that easily.
But here, the Warner Bros. version of how Harry Potter’s world should look is the definitive account of it now and for posterity. It has spawned amusement parks, dolls, and videogames. The entire franchise netted a grand total of zero Academy Awards, by the way, but no matter - its lasting value, I posit, will be seen in the coupled embrace of the books with the movies that generations to come will exhibit.
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