Coming Next in the Series: Harry Potter & the Order for a Bigger Rack

Now you don’t, now you see ’em: The Potter posters

Marketing is an immensely subtle practice today, exerting its influence over narrower and narrower realms of sensory focus, but this is absurd: Apparently, Warner Bros. marketing execs for 2007’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix decided that, for the movie’s IMAX version poster, Emma Watson needed something witchcraft couldn’t give her 14-year-old character, Hermione Granger: Bigger boobs.

As noted during the release, on BestWeekEver.tv, and as can be seen in the side-by-side comparison of the standard poster to the IMAX one, above, apparently someone overseeingwhat would become the sixth-highest grossing film of all time, and the fifth release in the highest-grossing film series ever, concluded that enlarging the character’s breasts, however slightly, might somehow pull in…what? More movie-going guys Hermione’s age? More nine-year-olds?

“I guess everything really does have to be bigger in IMAX,” BestWeekEver.tv dryly noted. But in the posters, she looks like she’s gone from an A-cup to a differently-colored A-cup. Why on earth did they bother with a detail, and this one, so inscrutable? (As well, in the IMAX poster, the Photoshop artist feathered her hair and added highlights to give her mane a more sexy, “blown-in-the-wind” effect. Please.)

Beyond the creepiness of what immediately comes to mind when seeing the comparison—adult men digitally fiddling with the size of a teenaged girl’s breasts as they grunt their approval or displeasure—what makes this even more nasty is the simple fact that the actor, Watson, above right, has a lovely and athletic figure, perfectly appropriate for her age and height.

This isn’t the first pop-cultural moment in which Hermione’s ta-tas were given a tender eye. Fans of Saturday Night Live may remember the May 2004 appearance of Lindsay Lohan in the “Hogwarts Academy” sketch, right. There, she plays Hermione as an eager naïf, suddenly all grown up, utterly unaware of the effect her summer vacation-gleaned cleavage is having on, uh, Harry’s wand. (Potter is impersonated by then SNL cast member / go-to gal for playing little boys Rachel Dratch, herself a buxom woman, ironically.)

However, the SNL sketch is funny because it played on the horny stupidity of boys, not to it. With three more Potter films to go, and Watson, herself, having now reached the age of consent (she turned eighteen on April 15th), we can now only wait and see how, in the randy hands of Warner Bros., Hermione becomes a woman.