So, after seeing all the 8 130+ minutes movies of the Harry Potter series, what's my overall opinion?
First, you have to admit that there is quite an uneven quality to the movies. While this is partly due to the changing tone of the original material, it is even more so due to the various drastic directorial changes in art direction. Because of that, even a casual viewer will end up with far-ranging opinions when comparing the movies to each other.
At the offset it is quite clear that the first movie had an enormous budget, and the following movies had the same budget bloat. The total budget well exceeds one billion US dollars. With that in mind, was it worth it? I'm not too sure. Yes, Harry Potter had a great cultural impact, but now that it's been a few years since the last book was published I wonder how quickly the series will disappear of our culture's consciousness beyond a few cultural references. Also, it too often felt like the movies were at the service of the books to promote them rather than being works of art on their own.
As an example, parallels can be made to the Lord of the Rings. The original books were panned by critics, and their objections are quite understandable: The first third of the first book has a jarring childish style compared to the rest, the books are filled with opaque references to imagined cultures and languages, the split up narrative between the hobbits and the humans doesn't work too well, and so on. Yet, the books organically grew in popular culture for decades, and when Peter Jackson's movies were released they were quite simply homages to the books. The movies were not only epic in scale but skillfully done, warranting the countless Oscars they received.
Per movie Harry Potter was done with the same budget as the Lord of the Rings, and there is no contest on which will have a more lasting impact in our culture as standalone works. It is as if even if the Harry Potter movies were made by its greatest fans, the source materials remain too shallow for the commercial scale that was expected out of it.
In short, while enjoyable, you can skip altogether Harry Potter and not miss much. Now, should I watch all those extra features on the disks?