J.K. Rowling Didn’t Fight for the Harry Potter Movies’ Most Overlooked Magic

At Hogwarts on film, class is dismissed: Astronomy vanishes so completely you’d never know Harry crammed under the stars, mapped the skies, and even sat an OWL.

For a saga set in a school, the Harry Potter movies quietly shoved a surprising amount of actual schooling off the screen. The wildest casualty? Astronomy. It does not just fade into the background — it basically vanishes.

Astronomy: the class the films airlocked

In the books, Astronomy feels like a real subject: late-night lessons up in the tower, telescopes and star charts, and an OWL exam that plays out during one of Hogwarts' most chaotic nights. On film, you mostly get a nice exterior of the tower and... that is it. The class itself? Gone. Professor Sinistra shows up so briefly you could blink and miss her, no lesson ever actually happens, and the subject adds nothing to how Hogwarts functions on screen.

It is a clean example of how the movies streamlined the day-to-day school stuff. And for what it is worth, that pruning came and went without any objection from J.K. Rowling.

It was not just Astronomy

Once you spot that disappearance, you see the pattern: several classes that help Hogwarts feel like a real institution in the books never make the cut on film, or get trimmed down to a single flavor note.

• Ancient Runes: Hermione studies it for years and uses it to translate things in the books. In the movies, the class and its professor do not exist.
• Arithmancy: One of Hermione's most demanding subjects on the page. On screen, it is a ghost.
• Muggle Studies: Supposed to help young witches and wizards understand non-magical life, which matters a lot in this story. The films never show a lesson or even mention it.
• Divination: Iconic in theory, but the films mostly keep it to Professor Trelawney's quirky moments and move on. The books dig into multiple techniques and exams; the movies do not.

Why Hogwarts never really felt like a school on screen

Feature films have to move. The books spend whole stretches on classes, homework, exams, and teacher dynamics; the movies strip that down to keep pace with Harry's main plot. So most classroom scenes that survive are directly tied to big story beats — learning the Patronus, brewing Polyjuice Potion, dealing with the always-new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher.

What gets left out are the routine lessons, study sessions, timetables, and general academic pressure that define student life in the books. And when half the curriculum is missing, Hogwarts starts to feel less like a fully functioning school and more like the staging area for a hero's journey.

'On film, Hogwarts is iconic more than academic.'

None of those choices are inherently wrong — that is just what happens when you squeeze long novels into two-hour movies. But it does explain why the cinematic Hogwarts keeps the magical vibe and loses a lot of the educational depth.

Could the new series fix this?

With a long-form Harry Potter series on the way, there is finally room to give those overlooked classes and their professors actual screen time. If the show leans into the school side of wizard life, Hogwarts could feel like the diverse academic environment the films never had space to show.

Think the new series will finally let Astronomy, Ancient Runes, and the rest breathe? Drop your take below.

All eight Harry Potter movies are streaming on Peacock if you want to revisit what did (and did not) make it into class.