Often, once a good book is released and rightfully loved by the public, the film world grabs it by the collar, and proceeds to punch it in the face. This devastating pattern can be noted in the movie series “Hunger Games” and “Percy Jackson”, yet one noble soldier shines through the fog of ruined stories, and that is The Harry Potter series.  

Undefeated in its trade, both the books and the movies have a stunning reputation for being absolute masterpieces. Some may wonder, what’s the difference? The books are long and intimidating to most, how could they possibly fit all of the necessary details into a film averaging around two hours? The answer to that is simple: good actors, good directors, and most importantly, an amazing writer, J.K Rowling herself. The details taken from the books and transcribed onto the big screen were specific and well thought through whereas, in other cases, the directors’ main focus is to summarize pages of dialogue into one scene. The Harry Potter movies do an amazing job of telling the viewer a lot about the character without much dialogue and without a ton of screen time: this is known as context clues. 

 One thing that stands out in the execution of the movies is that the final book in the series was divided into two movies. That really highlights how much the directors and producers cared about doing this series justice. A flaw of many movies that were once books on a shelf is how rushed they seem, especially to someone who read the book beforehand, but Rowling’s writing gave lots of room for interpretation and really let the directors of the films have some freedom, which totally spared them of feeling rushed. Not to mention the absolute spot on casting done for the films, and how the audience got to watch the main trio grow up throughout the years, giving it a real authentic feel. There will always be people who argue over which is better, the films or the books.  

Quite honestly, there is too much concrete evidence on both sides to be able to prove one better than the other, but one thing is provable: Harry Potter is one of the greatest stories to ever reach paper or film.