First, Ryan gets the credit for pointing this out to me.
As some of you may know, the Harry Potter movie is called “The Sorcerer's Stone” in the US, but “The Philosopher's Stone” in the rest of the world (including here in Canada). They even renamed the book (along with Americanizing the spelling), and every scene in the movie that mentions the “philosopher's stone” was re-shot for the US release to say “sorcerer's stone”.
I was trying to figure out why, and did a lot of searching, and found nothing giving a “why” for the name change. Well, I did find one kooky Christian site complaining about the name change trying to make an evil movie more “harmless”, but I'm not sure that counts.
The only reason we could come up with was that it was simply another example of “dumbing down” a piece of media so it can be served to a US audience. I suspect it's common knowledge in Europe, but the philosopher's stone was a substance that could transform lead into gold — one of the main goals of alchemy. Crazy stuff!
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