Harry Potter: A Template for Film Franchise Success

 By Ian Kavanaugh, Book-To-Film Franchise Project

          To successfully analyze the adaptation process novels undergo to become films, a vast amount of research would be required. To understand how to create a successful film adaptation, a small team with a lot of time or large team under a time restraint would be required. During UCSB’s 10-week Digital Humanities class, it became apparent that the five-man Book-To-Film Franchise research team had neither the manpower nor the time to reach any solid conclusions as to how a novel can be “successfully” adapted into a film. Nonetheless, by using various methods to compare the wildly successful Harry Potter and semi-successful The Chronicles of Narnia franchises, the team still began the paving of a path towards defining formulaic characteristics in both original novels and filmmaking techniques that make a novel into a successful film or franchise. In the film industry, success can be determined a movie’s ability to make money, leave a lasting legacy, and have a high average rating by its audience and critics. Ultimately, these factors are merely evidence of success, while the real reason lies in pursuing a deeper, more basic goal: a film’s ability to appeal and relate to any human being, despite age, gender, or any other social divide of audiences. Through use of different online analysis programs, the Book-To-Film Franchise research team was only able to provide evidence that the Harry Potter franchise was able to reach and satisfy a vast audience (money, legacy/impact, and high ratings). Restricted by manpower and time, the project was only capable of making baby steps in determining “how” Harry Potter’s original book series and film adaptation process resulted in a film franchise that appealed to such a large demographic.

            To first establish the Harry Potter film franchise’s success, the research team used online programs and websites to gather data, starting with Netlytic; the social network analyzer gathered and visually reorganized words from thousands of YouTube comments on trailers for different Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia films. For the team’s research purposes, it functioned in two ways to provide evidence for Harry Potter’s success in showing that it had a stronger social impact than The Chronicles of Narnia. First, it showed that user comments on Harry Potter movie trailers were more relevant to the franchise than on The Chronicles of Narnia, the trailers of which contained comments about other franchises or movie stars. Second, Netlytic graphed the number of posts over time that these YouTube trailers had. Harry Potter’s movie trailers had both a higher comment average and a less intense decrease in comments over time compared to The Chronicles of Narnia. Netlytic’s data was useful in providing the evidence that Harry Potter was successful in having a large impact on society, but this evidence still didn’t answer the question: Why was it more successful?

            Other online tools such as Umigon and Sentiment Analysis were useful, but ultimately didn’t do much to support the research team’s hypothesis as to why a the book-to-film adaptation is successful. In addition to collecting box office and movie review data, these tools merely provided evidence that proved the Harry Potter film franchise was able to reach an extremely large demographic, because it made a lot of money, had a large social impact, and had positive reviews. Umigon, a twitter analysis tool, was able to find that the Harry Potter film franchise had a verified twitter account that had up to date tweets, while The Chronicles of Narnia film franchise did not. In addition to Netlytic, this data showed that the “successful” Harry Potter franchise had more of a social impact. The Sentiment Analysis tool, which analyzes a certain text to determine it’s overall sentiment, didn’t create usable data for the project. Fortunately, websites such as IMDB.com and rottentomatoes.com provided average review scores for the films that put the Harry Potter films at a much higher average of positive reviews than The Chronicles of Narnia. Lastly, the team used boxofficemojo.com that the Harry Potter series had a much more consistent, growing rate of box office grosses than three The Chronicles of Narnia films, which made less money with each release. All of the data from these websites and online tools proved that the Harry Potter movie series fit the Book-To-Film Franchise research team’s definition of a successful adaptation, while The Chronicles of Narnia series did not. The data justified the project’s use of Harry Potter as a success template, but didn’t answer any deeper questions.

            To discover why the Harry Potter film franchise was so successful in comparison to other book-to-film adaptations, it is necessary to analyze the original books and the adaptation process that the filmmakers used to create the films. Ultimately, the significant reason behind the franchise’s success was that original series, written by J.K. Rowling, was able to appeal to a reader of any age, gender, ethnicity, or any other social group. For many reasons, it didn’t just appeal and relate to a certain type of human being, but to human beings themselves. The audience, made up of both readers of the books and viewers of the movies, could be absorbed into the story as if they were there. J.K. Rowling is mostly responsible for the Harry Potter franchise’s success, as she was able to write a fantasy series that was nearly perfect for adaptation onto the big screen.

            The narrative perspective of Harry Potter as the single main character is one of the most important factors in the series’ success.  The mere fact that the series’ narrative is limited to one perspective is an overlooked, but important aspect of Harry Potter’s wide demographic appeal. A multi-perspective narrative can be exciting to some, but takes more work on the audience’s part to put the story together, and therefore it appeals to a smaller demographic. While it may be easy to read about the four main characters in The Chronicles of Narnia novels, the multi-point narrative is harder to become absorbed into when adapted into a film. In Harry Potter, readers almost feel as if they are the main character, living the tale vicariously through the main character that J.K. Rowling carefully sculpted. When it was adapted to film, the single-point narrative perspective remained easier to follow. Though it might have been harder for viewers to feel as if they were Harry Potter, the narrative structure made it a lot easier to relate to him. Yet, the mere use of a single-point narrative perspective isn’t the only reason for Harry Potter’s success. The dynamic structure of his character allows an audience member of nearly any description relate to him and his journey.

            Though Harry Potter only reaches age 17 in the book, an immense portion of the franchise’s book readers and moviegoers were well into adulthood. He has characteristics, overcomes challenges, and upholds responsibilities that both children and adults can relate to. One Harry Potter character trait that transcends age is modesty (shyness). Throughout the novels and films, Potter could take advantage of his fame to boost his social confidence at the wizard school of Hogwarts, but instead he is almost embarrassed and scared of it. As a child or teenager, modesty is usually interpreted as shyness. Most children and teenagers can relate to being shy in school or other social situations; if they interpret Harry Potter as more modest, this is still widely viewed and accepted as a respectable quality. Adults can also relate to these character traits, as shyness and modesty exist in the workplace and other social situations in adulthood. Readers and moviegoers would much rather look through the point of view of a main character that has qualities that they respect and would be happy to have themselves. If Harry Potter was an overly confident, cocky wizard who used his fame to, let’s say, attract attention and gain popularity, the franchises’ audience might lose their appeal. The Chronicles of Narnia novels developed the main characters much less, making them much harder to relate to. In the first novel, when they all find out that they were “chosen” to lead the “good magical creatures” not too long after meeting them, they are immediately willing to sacrifice themselves “for Narnia”. This unrealistic decision-making by the main characters might go unnoticed by children, but the teenage and adult audience would most likely find it hard to relate to the main characters’ as real human beings. Though its easily justified that a very “human” character such as Harry Potter can be put in a fantasy world and remain relatable, some people may wonder, why is it so easy to relate to the magical world of Harry Potter as if it was as real as our own world?

            The series’ narrative introduces Harry Potter in his most human form, before he has found out that he is a wizard. This boy is thrown into the wizarding world with no knowledge on how it operates. This was a key decision in regards to the series’ narrative perspective, because the readers or moviegoers are as inexperienced with the magical world as Harry is. As he encounters magical phenomena, he is surprised and in need of an explanation just as much as the audience is. Harry Potter is more of a human that must learn how to be a wizard, and we (the audience) get to learn with him. By the time he must overcome greater challenges and fight larger battles in later books, the audience is as educated on magic as he is; we even understand most of the spells that he uses against enemies, because we remember when he was first taught them. This simple narrative decision makes it much easier for the reader or moviegoer to consider the wizarding world real; absorbed in his intricately real single-point narrative perspective, we adapt into the fantasy world at the same, slow, realistic pace that Harry does. If the novel centered around a character that was already a master wizard, it would cause the magical world of Harry Potter to seem as separate of a world as Narnia is, rather than a hidden part of the human world. J.K. Rowling takes many other measures to measures to make these two worlds seem like one.

            Another reason the audience found Harry Potter easy to relate to the narrative’s realistic depiction of time flow. As human beings, everyone lives their own “life narratives” that they organize by using different measurements of time. Each book (and film) is set within the time frame of one school year, usually leaving out most of the summer. This helps the audience to both remain connected to the characters across each installment. By organizing the narrative’s time structure in a way that the vast majority of consumer culture (book readers/moviegoers) does, the audience feels naturally inclined to follow narrative progression as the characters grow and plot unfolds across books. Also, the school year based narrative organization functions to make the fantasy world of Harry Potter seem more realistic and part of the human world. On the other hand, the Chronicles of Narnia’s narrative time awkwardly jumps around from book to book. In the second film adaptation based on the novel Prince Caspian, time in Narnia has progressed 1300 years. This makes it hard for the audience of the novels and films to both track a narrative connection between novels and takes Narnia seriously, as it is made so much separate from the human world.

            There are many literary decisions and factors that have allowed Harry Potter and other novels to successfully adapt to film based off the idea that both readers and moviegoers enjoy immersing themselves in a narrative they can relate to. A problem for some film adaptations, even if the books succeed, is being “faithful to the novel”. Some books are written in a way that allows the reader to have more control in envisioning the narrative’s world and characters. When adapted to film, these books will satisfy some people’s interpretations of the text, but not others. The film will be deemed “unfaithful” to the novel, when in reality it was impossible to be faithful in the first place, because the text could be envisioned in different ways. J.K. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter series with such unique and descriptive language so that readers’ visual interpretations of the novels were more or less similar. Rather than make very risky decisions in creating the film adaptations, the directors had to identify the visual narrative that Rowling had more or less already written. Thus, when they brought the series to life, the majority of people believed that the film franchise was faithful to the novels, mainly because of the way that J.K. Rowling originally wrote them.

            Deep textual analysis was necessary to explore the reasons behind why J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels translated so well to the screen. Just as novels are designed for the reader’s experience, films are designed to satisfy the viewer’s experience. In both relationships, writers and filmmakers can improve their product to affect the consumer’s experience and the amount of consumers that desire the experience. The Harry Potter series is astounding example of book-to-film adaptation that provided an excellent consumable experience to an extremely large demographic. Online textual analysis programs, social media analysis programs, review websites, and box office websites were able to show the evidence of Harry Potter’s success, but not the real reasons behind it. If given a larger research team and more time, the Book-To-Film Franchise project could be redirected to analyze the original text of Harry Potter and other adapted novel series such as The Hunger Games. This essay uncovered a mere fraction of the narrative structure characteristics that a novel, or even screenplay, should have if it is going to reach and satisfy such a large audience.