Hacker Cinema
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
2002 · Film · 161 min
Part of Harry Potter Collection
Directed by Chris Columbus
Cars fly, trees fight back, and a mysterious house-elf comes to warn Harry Potter at the start of his second year at Hogwarts. Adventure and danger await when bloody writing on a wall announces: The Chamber Of Secrets Has Been Opened. To save Hogwarts will require all of Harry, Ron and Hermione's magical abilities and courage.
2 neutralfrom 2 commenters
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2 comments on Hacker News
> lost all interest in Harry Potter when he was hanging outside a window, helpless. Then, his buddy appears with a flying car to rescue him.
Hmmm. When exactly does that happen? Are you referring to the very start of chapter 3 in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets? Because Harry most definitely is not hanging out of a window before his friends arrive.
He is kept locked up by his aunt and uncle. Because of that he is not answering his friend's letters. His friend has access to the magical means of busting him out (a flying car) so they do. If he would have decided to rescue him a day earlier or a day later he would have found Harry in basically the same situation.
This is the same in both the film [1] and the novel. Soooo what are you talking about? I think you made the scene up, which seriously undermines your point.
1: relevant scene in the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-Yi49pHlEo
> It would be like releasing a movie and changing the end one week after the release because of the bad reviews.
To me this is not that uncommon. Let me tell you a story (I cannot provide a quotable evidence for a central point of the story except for multiple friends who independently had the same feeling after seeing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets two times in few weeks when it came out in cinema in Germany).
At that time when this movie came out in Germany there was a law that "FSK 12" movies must only be watched by people who are at least 12 years old. The problem was: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was rated "FSK 12", while Warner would have liked it to be "FSK 6". So they cut some scene parts out of the movie to get this rating for the German cinema release (BTW: this incident lead to a change in the laws that now children under 12 years old may also go to "FSK 12" movies as long as they are accompanied by a parent). So far this is a story where for every claim I could provide strong evidence.
Now the strange part comes: (#) People who saw this movie shortly after release day and a few weeks after (in Germany) all could point out to some scenes (and they were the same) that they clearly remembered when they first saw the movie, but not the second time. So it seems to be that there were some cut alterings done afterwards and there were actually two different versions to be seen in German cinemas. I personally assume that this had to do something with the stated age restrictions (they forgot to cut some scene parts when they initially released the movie in the cinemas, so they hastily changed things afterwards and released a new version to the cinemas).
As I said: I can provide no independently verifiable evidence that (#) happened - but I deeply trust the independent persons that claimed so and I deeply trust their visual memory (I would only trust people who have a really good visual memory for such strong claims).
TLDR: changing a movie shortly after release is nothing that deeply surprises me.