You will never, ever guess how Voldemort was originally going to die in Harry Potter
The villain turned over a new leaf
A great villain deserves a great death, and no-one deserved to die more than Voldemort in the Harry Potter films. What fan could forget his defeat? That cathartic moment when, his final Horcrux destroyed and his forces scattered, the dark wizard succumbed to Potter's attack, and immediately turned into a tree?
Yep, you heard us.
“We invented new visual stuff, and we went through a whole bunch of concept art," VFX supervisor Greg Butler told the Huffington Post while describing the making of The Deathly Hallows Part 2. "There’s even some crazy stuff where he becomes this blackened, charcoal-y tree shape that’s growing and then that tree turns to ash and blows away in the wind...”
Wait, so at one point Tom Riddle, master of the dark arts and committed diarist, was going to turn into a tree? At least it wasn't a shrub, we suppose. That would just be humiliating.
“What we did was there’s a part where he’s sitting in the courtyard," Butler went on, "and then he turns into this blackened shrub-thing with fingery branches, and then I think we went larger and made it into a tree shape because we had a lot of screen space to fill.”
Of course while the image of Voldemort turning to ash stayed, the root idea of the tree was dropped at some point before the final production. We kind of want to see it though. After all, Voldemort's bark was always worse than his bite.
