A printing press from the wizarding world
The owl sent back news from afar.
On April 8, "Fantastic Beasts: The Mystery of Dumbledore" was officially released in mainland theaters. This time, the trailer not only has magical animals and GGAD's past, but also appears on the campus that is more familiar to the majority of Ha fans - "The Chosen Melon" Jacob got a magic wand, and the audience also followed his footsteps and saw the long-lost Hogwarts.
The village of Hogsmeade in the trailer
Although under the influence of the epidemic, "Fantastic Beasts: The Mystery of Dumbledore" did not perform well at the box office, with only 20 million on the first day. But even after a poor second film, the pre-screening popularity of Fantastic Beasts: The Mystery of Dumbledore (hereinafter referred to as "Fantastic Beasts 3") is still high, and before the release of the film, the total number of people who wanted to see Cat's Eye and Tickets exceeded 600,000, and it was almost a ride in the new film in April.
The audience's expectations for "Fantastic Beasts 3" are inseparable from the "Harry Potter" series to which it belongs. The little boy with the round-rimmed glasses still keeps scraping money out of Muggle pockets to this day: a 2021 extranet data list shows that "Harry Potter" ranks 10th in the world's most profitable IP list, and is the only IP in the TOP10 that originally took the form of a novel.
This is the charm of the wizarding world, and it is also the efforts of the creators and successors of the "Harry Potter" IP.
The Harry Potter universe
The final chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows depicts a happy ending to a great war.
The trio, who had ventured into Hogwarts, stood on platform nine and three-quarters and watched their children travel away on a red steam train. Harry touched the lightning-shaped scar, which had not hurt for nineteen years, indicating that everything had been peaceful in the nineteen years of the wizarding world.
The last novel was published in 2007, 15 years ago, and the series of films is long gone, but the "Harry Potter" boom in the Muggle world is far from gone.
As early as the same year as the release of the series, EA launched the game of the same name, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, in which players can play the protagonist Harry Potter and engage in a series of adventures for the first school year, including learning spells, flying and passing the Philosopher's Stone's protection levels.
The PC version of the game sold 860,000 copies in the two months of release in North America, which is already a bright achievement for the game market in 2001, and also proves the "gold" content of the "Harry Potter" IP.
Every game since then, selected to come out in the same year that the movie was released, is more like a case of film-game linkage - in several later games, film actors are also used for dubbing, and the Easter eggs in the game are also interview videos of film actors.
In addition to developing games, increasing the content of the IP matrix is also one of the common means to extend the vitality of IP.
Rowling herself has made "completions" to some of the side settings in the novel, such as in addition to the 7 novels in the main biography, she also wrote three other books, "The Magical Quidditch Ball", "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" and "Poetry And Beans Story Collection".
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the textbook for the Conservation of Magical Creatures class, and Magical Quidditch Spheres are books harry borrowed from the school library to tell the history of Quidditch, and the Chinese editions of both books were published in 2001, with handwritten annotations from Harry and others.
The Tales of The Poet is a fairy tale book from The Wizarding World left by Dumbledore to Hermione in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and is also the source of the important "Legend of the Three Brothers" in this book, in addition to this story, Rowling also added fairy tales from the wizarding world such as "The Fountain of Good Luck" and "The Witch's Hairy Heart".
Among them, Newt Scamander, the author of "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them", also became the male protagonist of the "Fantastic Beasts" series of movies many years later. When the first film was released, it grossed $814 million worldwide.
The timeline of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them precedes the showdown between Dumbledore and Grindelwald, and the story of the original", "Nineteen Years Later", is also added to the Harry Potter Universe.
In 2016, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (hereinafter referred to as "The Cursed Child") launched a stage play and script book, and the Chinese version was also released in China in October of the same year. Cursed Child extends some of the settings of the original, such as Albus Potter, who was assigned to Slytherin House at the end of the novel because of sorting concerns, Hermione became the Minister for Magic, and Ginny became the editor of the sports section of the Daily Prophet.
However, Cursed Child is an official stage play, but it does not count as a formal sequel to the novel, as the script was written by Jack Thorne and John Tifany, and Rowling only provided help, checking the main story and giving key settings. Coupled with the controversial use of black actors in the stage play, Voldemort and Bellatrix having a daughter, the evaluation is not as good as other complete settings in this "universe".
A magical "second world"
On September 20, 2021, the Universal Studios Beijing theme park officially opened, and "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter" has unsurprisingly become one of the most popular theme parks for tourists. People carrying butter beers, buying wands and wizarding robes in Hogsmeade's little shop, and hogwarts castle standing under the blue sky in the distance, as if all this were true.
Judging from the polishing of these derivatives, the "Harry Potter" series seems to rely not only on a specific character image, but rather on Hogwarts Castle, the Owl's Letter and John Williams' BGM - whether it is Harry or Newt, they have their own magical world adventure stories, and the audience is eager to participate in it and create their own stories.
This seems to explain the long-term vitality of the "Harry Potter" IP itself: the core of its charm is not the adventure plot experienced by the protagonists, but the entire immersive worldview, which can make people fascinated and make the audience want to believe in its existence.
Grindelwald actor Max Mickelson said in an interview that one of the charms of the wizarding world is escaping from the real world: "We live our daily lives 24 hours a day, day in and day out, and you need something to escape from reality... And the wizarding world is the ultimate source of escape. ”
Lin Pin, ph.D. of the Department of Chinese of Peking University and lecturer at Capital Normal University, once mentioned in his article that the construction of a grand and self-consistent world view system when telling stories is the most distinctive source of charm in modern fantasy literature.
The magical world created by Rowling is exactly in line with the reader's expectation of the "second world".
Wizards use words such as "Muggle" to distinguish themselves from those who cannot do magic, but in fact, the wizarding world is still closely connected to the world that ordinary people can see: the Broken Cauldron Bar is on Charing Cross Road, and only wizards who can magically notice its entrance; the platform nine and three-quarters, hidden in the brick walls of King's Cross Station, requires an express train to go to Hogwarts; and inside the Office of the Muggle Prime Minister, there is also a kinetic portrait that serves as a bridge between the Muggle Prime Minister and the Minister for Magic ......
At the same time, the vitality of the IP matrix also depends on the derivative content produced by the audience, and the overall setting of the magical world gives readers the space for secondary creation.
Rowling has only pinched out the large skeleton of the magical world, and the plot of the novel still revolves around The main perspective of Harry alone, and Harry's story focuses on the 90s of the last century, what happened before and after, enough for readers to use their imagination, even if it is a contemporary of Harry, readers can give them more details of their life at Hogwarts when they create it again.
Highly unified "IP interpretation rights"
"Harry Potter" can create an immersive experience, inseparable from rowling's initial shaping of the wizarding world, but also inseparable from rowling's high participation and Warner's overall control in the subsequent IP development process.
In 1997, British producer David Hayman decided to make it into a movie after reading the novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. He lobbied Warner Bros. to buy the rights, and Warner made the decision so quickly that he bought out all the rights to the Harry Potter series before the novel could be introduced to the United States.
The benefits of copyright harmonization are clear. The copyright ownership of the once popular IP "Notes from the Tomb Robber" in China is complex and scattered, resulting in the ebb and flow of many episodes and movies of "Notes from the Tomb", and even the starring role has been changed more than once. The entire Harry Potter series, including the Fantastic Beasts series, was produced by Warner Bros., and the lead actors maintained almost the unity of the 8 canonical films, with only some supporting roles replacing the cast. Affected by Depp's domestic violence lawsuit in Fantastic Beasts 3, Grindelwald was replaced by Max Mikkelson, or the main character was changed for the first time.
The series of movies has played an important role in the construction of the "Harry Potter" IP. Dai Jinhua, director of the Center for Film and Culture Studies at Peking University, once commented on the eight film series: "The Harry Potter film sequence can be described as a successful visual language, mainly a stylistic language, reproducing the magical world created by Rowling with her soaring imagination. Although the eight Harry Potter films were unevenly matched, they were all broadly capable of this challenging task. ”
In the construction of other content in the IP matrix, Warner is also actively involved. Take the mobile game "Harry Potter: Magical Awakening" as an example, the game was jointly developed by NetEase and Warner Bros.
In the behind-the-scenes developer interview video released on the official website of mobile game international service, there are several members from Warner Bros. Game Studio, including the chief screenwriter. He said: "We want to echo the clues of the past, rather than telling a story that repeats the previous one, obviously our protagonist corresponds to the famous trio, but this is not a story that is all about Harry Potter, our protagonists are Ivy, Daniel and the player." ”
On the other hand, Rowling has always been deeply involved in the construction of IP, which is also one of the elements to ensure the "originality" of IP content to the greatest extent.
Many IP content, including "Marvel", will often change the author of the comic and script. And "Harry Potter" because the origin of IP lies in the author Rowling, she has a high voice in the casting of actors, the direction of the script and other issues.
During the filming of the film, Rowling demanded that the protagonists must be British or Irish, single-handedly promoted the casting of actors in the United Kingdom, the trio of actors Emma Watson and Rupert Grint were almost complete film newcomers, and the actor Daniel Redcliffe had only one screen experience before playing Harry Potter.
Since the novel was not finished at the time of filming, Rowling also needed to check many changes in the script. The most well-known example is to help the actors better grasp the image, Rowling gave Snape actors a spoiler in advance of the outline of the later parts. During the filming of the first film, the crew found that Daniel was allergic to the beauty pupil, and had also asked Rowling for advice on whether he needed to change the color of the pupil, and Rowling directly said that as long as the eyes with Harry's mother were a color, it was possible - looking back now, it seems to be a kind of foreshadowing of the subsequent plot.
"Cursed Child" is the only script creation in the subsequent IP development in which Rowling was not directly involved. Of the three Fantastic Beasts films, the first two were written by Rowling herself, and the third was written by Rowling and Steven Koloff, one of the lead writers of the Harry Potter series.
However, Rowling's own strong binding with IP has also led to the two-way impact of the series of movies and Rowling herself. When Rowling was deeply involved in the transgender speech controversy, many actors who became popular because of the series of movies did not have the same views as her, which triggered a lot of negative public opinion. Rowling's creation of the script seems to be less rigorous than that of professionals, and the fans of the film are more content-oriented.
At present, the MTC score of "Fantastic Beasts 3" in the early word-of-mouth is 47 points, and the Douban score after the screening is 6.7, both of which have declined compared with the previous one. The reasons why the film has been criticized are similar to the previous one: the branches are scattered, the narrative is chaotic, the political plot is somewhat childish, and even many netizens directly call "deceived" - many of them go to the cinema for magical animals, but the frequency of small animals has been greatly reduced.
But for some people, that movie ticket carries an emotion, as long as the bridge with the wizarding world still exists, they are still willing to enter that world, because of the feelings of childhood, and because of that magnificent magical world, they are still believed.
Text | Long Chengfei
Edit | Zhao Ordinary