But you sow the seeds of your own demise when you wonder whether they could possibly cut down a book of that size into a movie. Of course they couldn’t. What the director/editors could count on, however, was that anyone who hasn’t read the damn book by now probably isn’t going to break out of their persistent vegetative state in time to see the movie, so why not make, as you phrased it, “cut scenes” that rivet the audience and terrify the small children? In a visual medium, it’s hard to justify screentime spent on Harry reading the newspaper as a plot point when you could have CGI-doped raw imagination shot in your face. Granted, the characters suffer and this won’t bode well for the movies being regarded as part of the canon of great SF/fantasy films, but C’MON!! THEY GREW VOLDEMORT OUT OF SNOT!! AWESOME!!