Where to watch Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)

Trivia & production notes

• David Yates was hired to direct after Mike Newell, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Guillermo del Toro, Matthew Vaughn, and Mira Nair all declined the job.
• Michael Goldenberg wrote the screenplay after Steve Kloves had other commitments; Goldenberg had been considered to write the first film in the series but was passed over at that time.
• Choreographer Paul Harris created a physical vocabulary for wand combat to choreograph the dueling scenes.
• Evanna Lynch won the role of Luna Lovegood after competing against 15,000 other girls at an open casting call where applicants stood in a line stretching a mile long.
• Helen McCrory was originally cast as Bellatrix Lestrange but withdrew four months into pregnancy because she would not be available for the intense Ministry of Magic battle sequences scheduled for September and October 2006.
• J.K. Rowling urged the filmmakers to keep the character Kreacher in the script after he was cut from an early draft, warning that excluding him would create problems for a potential seventh film.
• Kenneth Branagh's character Gilderoy Lockhart appeared in the first draft of the screenplay but was removed before the final version.
• The Quidditch subplot and character Angelina Johnson were cut from the film when actress Tiana Benjamin withdrew due to her commitment to playing Chelsea Fox on EastEnders.
• Filming was halted for two months starting in May 2006 to allow Daniel Radcliffe to take his A/S Level exams and Emma Watson to sit her GCSEs.
• The film's budget of £75-100 million made it the most expensive in the series, surpassing Goblet of Fire which cost £75 million.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.