(Spoiler-free, no worries.)

I’ve long been a proponent of leaving out the epilogue in the movie version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  It revisits a handful of the characters many years later, so when filming it, you’re stuck with two options, both bad:

1. Hire new actors to play the roles, so the audience spends the whole time thinking “Oh, he kind of looks like him…oh, they did a good job casting her…oh, he looks nothing like him…”
2. Keep the same actors to play the roles using aging makeup, so the audience spends the whole time thinking “Oh, the makeup is pretty good…eh, on him it’s not that good…wow I’m impressed they did such a good job with them…”

My point is, no matter how well you do it, it’s just going to take the audience out of the movie.  The story of Deathly Hallows ends with plenty of closure before the epilogue occurs, so why not just leave it out completely?

I mean, the only reason J.K. Rowling included it in the first place was to discourage any enterprising author or screenwriter from trying to pick up the rights and write an eighth or ninth story.

Unfortunately, MTV talked with Potter producer David Heyman, who claims the epilogue is a go:

“We will shoot it,” producer David Heyman confirmed for MTV News. Rowling wrote a flash-forward ending to “The Deathly Hallows” that shows where the characters end up as they grow older. Heyman also indicated that the original Hogwarts actors would be filling those roles for the sequence, rather than being replaced by older lookalikes.

“Yes,” he acknowledged, nodding that aging done to the characters would use the existing cast.

Potter purists who want the movies to exactly mirror the books will no doubt disagree with me, but at least try to see where I’m coming from.  From a filmmaking perspective, it’s a bad idea.