Oh, I Saw That Already
by Anne JamiesonI have one great fear about the upcoming Half-blood Prince movie: that I’ve seen it all already. Obviously, I haven’t, but with the plethora of trailers coming out every couple of months, it certainly feels like it.
There have been way to many trailers for this movie. By the time Order of the Phoenix came out, there had been four trailers. As of now, with three months left until Half-blood Prince debuts, there have been eight trailers.
Some of the same scenes are played in all the trailers, but there is enough new material each time to worry me. At the beginning of this onslaught, I was excited when a new trailer came out; now, it just brings the thought “Again? Really?” to my mind.
I remember every time a new trailer for Order of the Phoenix came out it sparked an intense discussion. My friend David and I would analyze every frame, pulling it up on the school’s crappy computers, watching it like we were hawks. We felt starved for information, and every time something new appeared, it was a marvel to us. It made going to the movie even better, because we saw the fruition of our crazed analyzing.
We stopped discussing the Half-blood Prince trailers after the third one came out. It just wasn’t fun anymore – the release date got pushed back, and suddenly all of this information was going to be useless until the middle of July.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that Warner Brothers thinks it is okay to hang a November release date in front of us like a carrot in front of a donkey then yank it impossibly high to eight months later, they’re ruining the experience! Part of the experience of seeing the movie is not knowing things. For example, in the most recent trailer, they definitively showed us that Katie Bell (or someone in her place) would fly in the air and scream, just as depicted in the book. If this had happened in the third trailer, I would have been thrilled. Now, it just irks me that I know more than I did before.
Some things are better left until after we see the movie. It increases the pure awesomeness of the whole thing – being able to chatter excitedly afterwards about things you never expected. “Wow, did you see those inferi?” and “I can’t believe they put that in!” As new trailers continue appearing, our chances for this are becoming slimmer. It is my greatest fear whenever I see the trailer for a movie that looks absolutely fabulous that they’ve put all of the good bits into the trailer, and this fear is intensified a hundred-fold for Harry Potter movies because of the emotional attachments I hold for the books. I don’t want this movie to be ruined, and I’m afraid that the abundance of information given to us by Warner Brothers is well on its way to doing just that.
So please, WB. Lay off it for a while. Withholding information peaks interest; it doesn’t allow it to wane. Especially not for Harry Potter fans.
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