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Hallows goodbye: The end of Harry Potter


If you lived through the Age of Enlightenment, you probably didn't know it. Likewise, the Age of Reason. Or the Age of Innocence. But the Age of Harry? For Muggles not to know they've been living through the Potter Era would be like not noticing a Hogwarts' commencement exercise marching through their living room. Or the noseless Voldemort sitting in the breakfast nook.

When "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2" opens Friday (actually midnight Thursday at many theaters), it will mark the end of something — though probably not entirely the enchanted Pottermania that has made the series the most popular in film history. And which has helped sell 450 million copies of the seven J.K. Rowling novels on which the movies are based. Certainly, when the second half of the last movie is finally released — in 3-D, which was still more or less a novelty when the inaugural "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" was released in 2001 — it will free Daniel Radcliffe (age 21), Rupert Grint (22) and Emma Watson (21) from the characters that have defined their young lives (and made them, one hastens to add, financially independent). It will mean more free time for a big bunch of older British actors. And it will make finite, in a way, the Potter Generation: kids, many of whom are no longer kids, who read the books, saw the movies, were disappointed when they turned 11 and didn't get an invitation to Hogwarts Academy, and will see the conclusion of the films as a bittersweet punctuation point on the entirety of their childhoods.
It's been 15 years since the whole thing started (with the books), 10 since the movies began, and while David Yates hasn't been on it that long, he seemed ready to leave the wizards behind. When the last installment was "98 percent in the can," the director — the fourth to take on "Potter" (after Chris Columbus, Alfonso Cuaron and Mike Newell) — said he often met the same kind of question. "'With three directors before you, a book, other source material, what is it that you DO?' And I say, 'A lot, actually!' But it goes back to that notion that it doesn't belong to anybody. I can truly say this belongs to the audience; that's what it feels like to me."