this is brilliant +1. i immediately thought of the borrowers but that only has three apparently (malfoy, arthur weasley, slughorn), it felt like the entire cast was potter-based to me.

ragbag:

movie magic

i was watching sense & sensibility in the back of my neighbour’s minivan while on a stakeout the other night and realized that professors snape, trelawney, and umbridge had each somehow apparated into the cast. my neighbour (who is a former hogwarts alumna) pointed out that cornelius fudge and madam pomfrey were also in it. was this a record for the most harry potter wizards in a non-harry potter film? i decided to abandon the surveillance (there was only one pair of high-powered binoculars anyway) and scrape some data from the imdb.

the project turned out to be bigger than i expected. there were hundreds of wizards and tens of thousands of movies in which they appear. in the end, when the pixie dust settled, i was left with at least 23 movies infiltrated by 4 or more potter people. i made this chart (click to engorgio) to show the tangled relationships among them.

here are a few observations:

• the movie with the most harry potter wizards in it is vanity fair with an unprecedented 9* wizards. 
• the muggle that these wizards most like to work with is johnny depp who stars in 4 of these movies (3 of which were directed by tim burton).
• horace slughorn (a known attention whore) has wormed his way into no fewer than 5 of these movies, the most of any wizard.
• conspiracy theory: 6 of these movies were in theatres before the first harry potter book was released. there is even historical evidence that 4 wizards worked on crook’s anonymous which was released back in 1962 before magic was invented.
• the sorting hat and aragog were in king ralph? i’ll have to rewatch that one on tonight’s stakeout.

__

*and also at least one extra who worked on both films.
fwiw: this program works a magic all its own.