I love books.
I love movies.
I love books that are turned into movies.
But what I hate is when a book is twisted and changed by the time the movie hits theaters.
Let’s take “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” for example.
Spoiler alerts ahead.
In the fifth book, Harry and the gang clean out Grimmauld Place since nobody lived in it for more than 10 years.
They clean out the drawing room in one of the scenes. While in the drawing room, they find an old locket in the cabinet; everyone attempts to open the ancient locket but to no avail.
It turns out [readers find out in the seventh book] the locket is one of Voldemort’s Horcruxes; in order to kill Voldemort, Harry must destroy Voldemort’s seven Horcruxes.
Unfortunately though, the little scene of them finding the locket was left out of the movie.
The fact that the drawing room scene, as small as it was, was left out of the movie infuriates me. J.K. Rowling obviously put the simple scene in there for a reason and it bothers me that she allowed them to leave it out. They left out a very important foreshadowing part.
By leaving out the foreshadowing part, movie viewers never made the connection with the locket and Horcruxes.
Now, let’s jump to a little bit further in “Order of the Phoenix.”
There is a chapter in the book titled, “Snape’s Worst Memory.”
In the chapter, while learning Occlumency, Harry manages to get inside Snape’s head and see the Potions Master’s worst memory.
His worst memory, in short, is his worst memory because it was the day that Lily [Harry’s mother] said that she did not want to be friends with him anymore because he called her a Mudblood.
In the movie though, his worst memory is made to seem like his worst memory because James [Harry’s father] bullied him. That, sadly, is not the case.
It makes me mad that they cut out when Lily said she doesn’t want to be his friend because that scene showed just how obsessed Snape was with Lily.
Again, it wasn’t until the eighth movie that the viewers found out about how Snape was obsessed with Lily.
Another one of my favorite books that got turned into a movie and was [slightly] ruined was “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.”
“Perks” is about a freshman in high school, named Charlie, who writes letter to an anonymous friend about his life and his struggles. The book is an easy read and really resonated with me.
Finding out it was being turned into a movie made me excited. I was curious to see what they would keep in the movie and what they would take out.
Unfortunately, I was slightly disappointed.
The movie left out the part where the main character, Charlie, was reading a poem to his friends. The poem talked about suicide and was very hard for Charlie to read.
It was probably one of my favorite parts in the book yet it was left out because it was “too much” [according to the director] for the viewers to handle.
The poem also showed a side to Charlie that hadn’t been shown before in the book and it gave another level of depth to the main character.
While I understand that scenes in books may be left out of movies because of heavy content or time constraints, leaving out scenes might not always be for the best.
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