Harry Potter Movies Ruined This Villain by Deeming Fans Too Dumb

Summary:

• In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, we meet one of the series’ most unique villains, Barty Crouch Jr.
• The book presented Crouch Jr. as an innocent terrified man, setting the audience up for a shocking plot twist.
• The movie version deemed fans too dumb to understand the finale, so it made Crouch Jr. blatantly evil and insane from the start.

The Harry Potter series has its fair share of villains, some of them even more hated than Lord Voldemort (hem, hem). Unfortunately, while the notorious sadistic bright-pink toad turned out perfectly in character in the movie adaptation, her predecessor didn’t. In fact, the fourth installment’s main villain was an entirely different character than he was in the books.

Barty Crouch Jr. Was a Great Villain

In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, we don’t learn about the true antagonist until the falling action of the movie/book. Barty Crouch Jr. reveals his true colors (and his very existence) only after the finale of the Triwizard Tournament, when Cedric is already dead, Voldemort is already back, and the audience is already convinced they know what happened.

What made Barty Crouch Jr. such a great villain was his unique transformation skill. He pretended to be Alastor Moody for the entire school year, and we’ve grown to love him; but that wasn’t this antagonist’s most impressive transformation, either. The one that truly deserved an Oscar happened many years before The Goblet of Fire’s events — but in the movies, it didn’t happen at all.

Movie Crouch Jr. Was a Different Character

Both in the original books and the movie adaptation, we first “meet” Barty Crouch Jr. in Dumbledore’s memories from after Voldemort’s fall. But who do we see there?

In the book, we see a very young man who’s genuinely distressed and terrified. He was shivering and white; he insisted that he was innocent of the crimes he was accused of; and he was begging his father, Barty Crouch Sr., to believe him and release him. The latter still disowned him and sent him to Azkaban, earning a terrible reputation among his fellow wizards.

The movie, however, shows us a completely different person. The movie Crouch Jr. is neither a young man nor a petrified one. He’s a clinically insane villain who laughs at the accusations and taunts his father; challenges him. He’s so obviously a bad guy that it’s also comical — except, that serves no purpose to the plot.

In the book version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, we genuinely sympathize with Barty Crouch Jr. and despise his father. He looks innocent and wronged, and that sets us up for a great surprise in the finale. But the movie Crouch Jr. is blatantly a sadistic sociopath — because apparently, movie fans were deemed too dumb to understand the finale otherwise.

And that both robbed them of a truly shocking plot twist — and ruined an amazing character, the real master of transformation and theatrics, that Crouch Jr. was.