Can you clarify why you believe that they aren't?
Aren't what? My question is about a choice between two possibilities -- either the movies are in the book canon or they're in the film canon. Or the third possibility that maybe they're supposed to be canonical to both, despite the variations between the two. The whole reason I'm asking is that I don't
know what the answer is. I don't have a preconceived belief, I just have a question.
The only difference I can think of between the novels and the screenplay is formatting, which doesn't seem to be a good reason to assume otherwise to me.
Of course
there are differences. It's impossible to adapt a work from one medium to another without making changes. There are whole huge swaths of story in the books that are not included in the movies, whole characters and subplots that are missing, scenes that are altered or combined or invented wholesale. There are differences of interpretation to make the films more visual. For instance, one of my least favorite things about the first movie was that it took the mysterious, inexplicably shifting architecture of Hogwarts -- where a path that took you one place on one day would take you someplace entirely different the next, for reasons that were unseen and unknowable, as if the school were dimensionally transcendental or reality itself were being rewritten -- and replaced them with the boringly prosaic gimmick of staircases visibly pivoting around while the students stood on them.
So it's a given that any adaptation will change things. That is literally what the word "adapt" means. What I'm not sure of is whether any of the changes between what the books say and what the films say is relevant to the time frame of the
Fantastic Beasts films, to the backstory of Dumbledore and Grindelwald and Scamander and Flamel and the rest. And I'm just wondering in general about the mechanics of the author of a book series that was adapted into movies then going on to write her own movie prequels. It does sort of blur the lines that would otherwise be self-evident.
The only thing that's canon is "My Immortal." Everything else is not.
Seriously, though, I'm not personally aware of any "statement of canon." My hunch, for what it's worth, is that Rowling doesn't even conceive of the Harry Potter universe in that way, given her habit of making statements about the universe (like the revelation that Dumbledore was gay) that exist outside of the books and the films but have an effect on the way the books are read, as well as Pottermore's ethos of essentially treating everything as valid. At the same time, Rowling's comments on the casting of Hermione in The Cursed Child suggests that the movies' interpretation of the books is just that, an interpretation.
But yes, that's exactly the point. The movies are just an interpretation of the books. The books are the full story as Rowling intended them; the movies are other people's attempt to create cinematic works inspired by them. It should go without saying that if books are made into movies, the movies are the secondary version, just an approximation of the real thing -- or that they're their own distinct works that use the books as a starting point but should be judged independently, like
Blade Runner. Granted, the Potter movies are relatively more faithful to the books than most movie adaptations, but they're still just approximations, and they leave out a great deal of content, so they can hardly be considered the comprehensive version of the narrative.
Of course, the FB movies may be written and produced by Rowling, but they're still directed by David Yates and also produced by Heyman, Kloves, etc. from the HP movies. So they're not "pure" Rowling, and as a rule, the director and producers have more clout over a movie's content than the screenwriter. So that would probably make these movies more closely aligned with the HP movie "reality" than the book "reality." But the question is, if Rowling weren't satisfied with how a previous movie depicted or changed something from the books, and she had an opportunity in these movies to address it again, which version would be reflected? Which is probably not a question that can be answered until or unless it happens.
Maybe, like Doctor Who, Harry Potter has no canon. Or at least, not one in the Star Trek sense. Your question may not have an answer.
For all that fandom has tried to mythologize the word "canon" as some magic talisman, it's basically nothing more than a nickname for the original work as distinct from its adaptations or tie-ins. Generally, it's an enormously simpler matter than fandom makes it out to be. In this case, though, we have an original continuation that's by the original author, but is in the same medium as the adaptations and in collaboration with their creators. So that blurs the lines in an interesting way.
