Ease Our Aching Bladders!

After straining the attention spans of even the most attentive children and doubtless increasing cases of pre-teen piles tenfold, the Harry Potter franchise's increasingly exorbitant runtimes may finally be taking a cut. New kid on the Hogwarts block Alfonso Cuaron has declared that his adaptation of The Prisoner of Azkaban will be the shortest film so far. The Philosopher's Stone pushed children to breaking point as they tried to contain their sugar-infused bodies - turbocharged with family bags of Maltesers and Big Gulp cups of Coke - for 152 painful minutes while events transpired onscreen. Imagine their horror when The Chamber of Secrets failed to end in a timely fashion and looked perilously close to hitting three hours when it stressed tweenie bladders to the point of irreparable damage at 161 minutes. Cuaron has pledged to stop this dangerous trend and bring his film in just shy of the two-and-a-half hour mark. Hey, it may not be a huge cut but at this point we'll take whatever we can get. "I'm sure that somebody is going to miss something very specific that was ingrained in his or her mind when they read the book," Cuaron told Associated Press of his cuts. "But I think fans are going to love the movie." Which is all very well but doesn't help Mike Newell, the man tasked with bringing The Goblet of Fire to the screen. With the book too big to fit in the average nipper's clammy hands and a pagination easily doubling its predecessor's, Newell's runtime may run into days rather than hours. Best invest in that dialysis machine now, while the sales are on.