Thank goodness that’s over. Except, of course, it’s not.

The last Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, is in theaters and already setting box office records, but Pottermania will continue not only in books and countless ancillary products but also in the new ebooks that J.K Rowling will sell on her Pottermore website.

And nothing keeps Rowling and/or Warner Bros. from continuing the story, as awful an idea as that seems.

“Providing a script is good enough,” Daniel Radcliffe (a.k.a., Harry Potter) told MTV recently, “I would absolutely do another.”

Likely, no one was surprised to hear him say that. Though Radcliffe has other movies lined up, the young actor’s performances in the Potter movies were to the end marked by what one British critic referred to as “plankishness.” His career may not follow the dismal trajectory taken by Mark Hamill after his run in Star Wars was over, but it remains to be seen how much post-Potter star longevity Radcliffe will have.

But, speaking of Star Wars, if George Lucas can milk that saga on into his doddering years – everyone get ready for the coming 3D conversions – why shouldn’t we expect the Harry Potter machine to keep churning out product? (Here  is a story in the Wall Street Journal about Warner Bros. plans to keep the franchise alive.)

I used the word “product’ on purpose.

So much naked mercenary calculation went into the manufacture and distribution of the Harry Potter movies that, taken as a whole, they threaten our understanding of what a film adaptation – even a highly commercialized film adaptation – is or is supposed to be.

The day is coming, we’re told, when media will merge, giving us electronic fiction that combine text and video, each supporting the other, neither designed to stand alone.

That day is closer than you think.

For all of their flash and entertaining sizzle, the Harry Potter movies do not hold up as stand-alone movies the way that, say, James Bond movies do. They never were meant to. It isn’t just that they all are pieces of one very long tale. Sit and watch all of the movies back to back and you will see characters appear on screen with little or no back story, characters with no emotional arcs, characters that barely serve the story, if at all.

The back story is supplied by the books. The characters say a few lines, to the delight of fans well-immersed in Potter lore, then the characters disappear. If people who haven’t read the books aren’t left scratching their heads in bewilderment, it’s only because the film then has moved on to a fiery set piece that demands our attention – not because we care but because, well, it’s got a dragon in it, and the CGI is cool.

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These characters are on screen for no reason other than that they are in the books, and fans expect to see them.

Movies are different from books. In a proper adaptation – one focused on making great films to stand independently of the novels – these characters would be excised or combined. But from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone onward, the Potter movies were meant to be extensions of an already hugely successful franchise, much like the toys, costumes and other ancillary products.

These are movies for the video game age or, rather, for the age of cross-promotional, multimedia synergy. Fans now are used to getting their story in multiple places – from the original book or comic, from the game that builds on the story, from the TV series that grows from the book and, oh, yes, from the movie that, in the old days, would stand on its own, perhaps to live through the ages, but now is just another franchise part.

In my review for the Houston Chronicle of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 2001, I called the movie “an immaculate transliteration” of J.K. Rowling’s text – a crafty but soulless artifact that made no attempt to reimagine the book or even to come to terms with its emotional essence.

The fans, after all, already had already conjured a movie in their head. Warner Bros. set out merely to cast it upon a larger, public screen, just the way fans already imagined it – only better.

It is no wonder that the one director of vision to tackle the series – Alfonso Cuaron of Mexico – made the movie (Prisoner of Azkaban) that critics prefer but that also made the least amount of money at the box office. The fans didn’t want anybody else’s vision. They wanted to see the movie already playing in their head projected onto the screen.

And that is what the Harry Potter movies have given them.

There is, of course, value in that – entertainment value, commercial value, the value of shared experiences, the lessons learned by young fans about friendship, bravery, selflessness and sacrifice, the power of goodness to triumph over evil.

But cinematic value? Not so much.