Harry Potter 5: The Movie completely changed this painful scene from the novel

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix could have been much darker than it was on screen. The feature film cut many passages from the book and changed some, reducing their overall importance to the saga and especially the scene of Neville Longbottom’s past.

In the fifth volume of The Adventures of Harry, and more precisely in chapter 23 of The Weasley Family, Harry, Hermione, and Neville, along with others, go to St. Mungo’s Hospital to visit the injured Arthur Weasley. In this case, the reader directly discovers what happened to Neville’s parents.

The young heroes meet Augusta Longbottom, Neville’s grandmother, who introduces them to the young man’s parents, Frank and Alice, who have lost their minds. During the First War against Voldemort, they tortured He Who Shall Not Be Named because, as Aurors, they knew about Dumbledore’s hiding place. They are finally – and forever – mentally cared for in this hospital for witches.

This moving sequence, which gives you chills just thinking about it, was not saved for the film. The latter does not cover the tragic fate of Longbottom’s parents, but does so in a completely different way. At the Mirror of Erised, in which he contemplates them, Neville tells Harry about the ordeal inflicted on Bellatrix Lestrange.

No details are given about their possible survival and they are assumed to be dead, while the truth in the original work is much more complex and tragic.

In defense of the directors and producers, the fifth Harry Potter novel is the densest and therefore inevitably the most truncated to make it to the big screen. Paradoxically, at 2h18, it is one of the shortest feature films in the franchise, narrowly beaten by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 and its 2h10.

Moreover, this is not the only scene that was cut from the saga, and here is one that would have changed everything for the character of Drago and another that would have added some love to the magical saga!

Harry Potter is undergoing a reboot of the series, which again adapts the novels with a book-to-book season concept. Hopefully, they will restore Order of the Phoenix to all its density and complexity.