For me its the characters. For the most part I view them all as their actors, with Harris instead of Gambon. Oddly enough though, I don't hear their voices when I read, but I don't really have distinctive voices for any characters in any book I read. I always just read in my voice.

 

I like to pretend the movies dont exist.

Richard Harris is how I imagine Dumbledore though.

 

I agree with this whole comment so much.

Richard Harris' portrayal is definitely closer to my mental imagine of Dumbledore than Michael Gambon's, but it's still not quite right. I can't picture Harris, for example, swapping "his pointed wizard's hat for a flowered bonnet" that emerged from a wizard cracker at the Christmas feast. Dumbledore is a cartoon of a person, and I love it. It's no surprise that these esteemed actors can never get it quite right.

 

Not at all, since until last year I had believed mental pictures to be nothing but metaphors and flowery language. Threw me for a loop when I learned it was a real thing.

 

I read the books once each as they came out and never read them again. Ditto the movies, until very recently I saw them once and never watched them in whole again (my niece drinks her bedtime milk to them now. The chad doesn't even flinch at the basilisk, defo a snake that one).

Fanfiction thoroughly supplanted everything else as a knowledge-base for me, which would normally be disastrous if you care about canon (I kinda don't), but I still beat my super-fan sister at HP trivia like she's a red-headed stepchild.

All that is to say I genuinely can't remember the time between having read the books and watching their movie counterpart, so I kinda can't answer this question...

I think maybe Hermione being hot is the only one that I can remember gazumping me?

 

They changed how I view Snape. Before I saw the movies, I pictured him as a 30 year old. After the movies, Alan Rickman stuck with me. Same for Lupin. Which is really odd, because I still imagine Sirius close to his age in the books, and these two as much older and yet they all went to school together.
Also, I imagined the wands - I don't even think I put much thought into them, other than they were wooden sticks. Funny enough, I still imagine them the same way except for Voldemort's, that I know picture as in the movies.

 

Being a young child when the first book came out, and consuming it via walkman cassette player with the soothing voice of Stephen Fry in my ear, I projected my own experiences in my mind. Which growing up in the suburbs of Brisbane is slightly different from England. Hell just the idea snow itself was magical.

I always thought Hogwarts was a lot smaller, Ron being a lot more gingery as well as the Weasley home being a bit more cartoony. I imagined Hogwarts library similar to my primary school library, so the movie defiantly approved on that.

Though the largest difference that I can remember, was Harry's cupboard under the stairs. In my childhood home we had a cupboard under the stairs, which had a standard size door for its entry. I can remember I spent hours in there, looking over dusty old trophies and all manner of junk. And thinking that Harry had it pretty good.

 

For me it's probably quite different to most of you guys. I've seen the first movies before I read any one of the books, but before that I read HP fanfiction. So, I guess, for me fanfiction and the various tropes, good and bad, influenced me far more than the movies -- from which mostly I've only taken how now the characters in my mind look like the actors -- and probably far, far more than the books.

 

I disliked the films a lot when they first started coming out, and have only tried to rewatch them without judging and ridiculing them recently, so I was ready to say that they haven't changed anything about how I view the wizarding world, but that's not really true. Hagrid in my mind looks like the actor for him and sounds like him. I know I used to imagine McGonagall as an English noblewoman of a bygone world, but I think of her as Scottish now, even if she doesn't look like dame Maggie. The school grounds and the quidditch pitch in my head have I think been influenced by the films, the castle itself less so. The interiors of the castle and most shops and pubs and the Burrow I imagined brighter and happier and surrealer and with more sparkle than the films. What has influenced me a great deal are the covers for the books as I first read and reread them (Swedish version) and when I think of Harry i distinctly see him as he appeared on those covers, the smug little smile he has in the fourth one in particular.

 

Yep, those ones! The fourth and fifth of mine are falling to pieces though, too many pages