We are totally surprised how often we get this question:
How many Harry Potter movies are there?
Why are we surprised? Because it’s a pretty straightforward answer!
There are 8 Harry Potter movies.
So why do so many people ask us this question? After asking our questioners, it turns out that MOST of them are confused because there are 7 books, but 8 movies. This is because the last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was split into two movies. Why did this happen? It depends on your personal opinion and interpretation of things, but the most likely answers are:
1. The book was simply too long to fit into one movie (this is true for the most part, but the same could have been said for some of the other books, too, and they managed to fit them all into one film each).
2. Warner Brothers (the company that produces the Harry Potter DVDs and movies) wanted to make more money, so they added an extra movie, knowing that one more movie would make them that many more hundreds of millions of dollars richer (a similar thing happened with the Twilight movies, where the final book was split into two movies).
3. The filmmakers really did want to do justice to the books, and trying to squeeze all of the action in the final book into one movie would have been impossible.
While it’s true that the 7th movie (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1) was kind of slow, and it had a lot of traveling and hiding out, it did allow the movie to take on the melancholy tone of the seventh book. If the book had been made into one movie, it’s likely that much of the action in the first part would have been cut out to make room for all the action that comes in the second half.
Whatever the reason, most fans are simply happy that they got one more Harry Potter movie!
