Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone Movie Was Originally 3 Hours Long

Director Chris Columbus has revealed the original cut of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone shown to test audiences ran almost three hours long. Columbus convinced Warner Brothers to let him direct the first movie based on the strength of his filmography, which includes the Christmas classics Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and Robin Williams’ hit comedy Mrs. Doubtfire. The first Harry Potter film was a smash hit, making almost $1 billion worldwide, and saw Columbus return for the first sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

That movie was similarly successful, but Columbus didn’t return to helm any of the other films in the franchise, with WB favoring filmmakers who could age up the content along with the characters. Though, Columbus’ efforts stand the test of time as two classic children’s adventure movies and an appropriate introduction to the iconic characters from author J.K. Rowling’s book series. One of the most common criticisms of the movies is their runtime, unusually long for children’s movies. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone runs 152 minutes, while Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is even longer at 161 minutes. They both pale in comparison to the first cut of the former movie.

Columbus tells Collider his first of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was 172 minutes long, just eight minutes short of three hours. He says the more extended version of the movie was screened to a test audience in Chicago, and the children loved it. He adds that the parents who watched it thought it was too long, despite liking it overall. You can read his full comments below:

By the time we finished the film and we screened it in Chicago – it’s good luck for us to screen our films in Chicago, so back in the day when we could go to a movie theater we would fly to Chicago and show the film to an audience – the audience loved it. The audience just ate up the film. The film was two hours and fifty minutes long at that point and the kids thought it was too short and the parents thought it was too long.

It’s hardly surprising that parents found the movie too long. To sit and watch a children’s movie with which they likely had little connection, as the Harry Potter books had not crossed over as adult hits quite yet, for almost three hours must have been excruciating. Even at 152 minutes, the movie drags at points for adults, and the ending arguably goes on too long. That it was cut down following that first screening is a sign WB realized they’d need to trim some of the fat, as they say, to keep both die-hard fans and casual moviegoers engaged. The resulting movie is considered a classic, proving the decision was right.

As it stands, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is the second-longest movie in the franchise, with only Columbus’ other directing effort, The Chamber of Secrets, running longer. The other directors clearly realized the need to be judicious with their editing, no matter how dense the source material is. Columbus’ revelation may cause fans to campaign for the original cut. Still, it’s unlikely ever to see the light of day, given the version eventually released was as long as it needed to be.

Source: Collider

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Daniel Gillespie
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Daniel Gillespie has been a writer and editor since 2009.

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