Why the Harry Potter Series is a Terrible Idea

We are going to be having a fuller slate of articles this week than we have over the past two months, and I'm super excited because I am pumped to be in a position where I can actually write again without worrying about a lot of other things happening in the background of my life, and so we're going to tackle a few articles that I've been putting off or wanted to give my opinions on.  Today, we'll discuss a topic that both had its brief "Twitter moment" this past week, and yet will almost certainly be a topic for the months ahead: Warner Brothers' proposed Harry Potter series that will take place over ten years and seven seasons, each season covering one of the books.

Let's take a step back here before we dive in to give you two pieces of context.  First, I think Warner Brothers' management of their company has been a testament to how badly a legendary studio can be run into the ground.  Everything from throwing aways tens of millions by trying to boost their streaming site (movies like Godzilla vs. Kong, Dune, and The Matrix Resurrections surely saw their box offices depleted solely by putting them on streaming rather than exclusively in theaters) to completely upending the DCEU without any real logic other than "let's start over," forgetting that audiences might not want to start over.  There's this myth that superheroes are like James Bond where theatergoers will be fine starting from scratch, but with the exception of Batman, that's not really true-no one liked the post-Christopher Reeve Superman attempts, and it seems risky to recast roles like Wonder Woman & Aquaman when actors like Gal Gadot & Jason Momoa have so properly inhabited them...how do you live up to that (a lesson we'll need to remember in a second)?  Plus, the last two DCEU movies (Black Adam and Shazam 2) being high-profile flops indicate that, beyond the Caped Crusader, it's possible no one cares, a terrifying prospect for the studio.  Renaming their streaming platform "Max" when "HBO" is one of the most storied brands in television?  It's basically the equivalent of taking Nike and renaming it "Shoe Store."

Secondly, I am a huge Harry Potter fan, way more than an adult man in his thirties should probably admit to being.  I am not wearing a Harry Potter shirt right now (though I own five of them), but from where I'm typing this I can literally see a Remembrall, the Sword of Gryffindor, two Sorting Hats, Harry's glasses, a wall-hanging detailing out the mechanics of wands, and two literal stacks of Harry Potter books.  And I don't even think this is the room with the most Harry Potter stuff in my house.  I am a big enough fan that while most audiences were greeting Secrets of Dumbledore with antipathy, I was throwing a party for all of my friends that included butterbeer and Hagrid's hot pink birthday cake with green icing.  I am about as obsessed as you can get with the franchise, and am about as ideal of an audience for a TV show as you can get...

...and yet I don't want it.  In fact, it actively makes me upset that they're even trying to do it.  Part of that is that, like virtually all Millennial or Gen Z Harry Potter fans, I am completely embarrassed by the actions of JK Rowling in the past few years with her bigoted public crusade against transgender people. Rowling is one of those billionaires who could have just shut up and remained beloved, raking in money forever while being adored by fans who love the world she created...but instead gave away her entire reputation & forever tarnished everything she created by showing a cruelty toward myriad fans of her work by being wrapped in a conservative hatred of transgender people (I've seen defenses of her written, they don't work on me anymore-she's not dumb, and she knows what she's doing...nuance went out the window a while ago on this one, she's just transphobic).  Rowling has made it extremely difficult to separate art from artist, which I generally try to make a priority.

But it's more than that.  For starters, there's not a lot to add to this story.  Fans will oftentimes discuss with big-screen adaptations of major literary series (not just Harry Potter, but also Lord of the Rings, Twilight, and Game of Thrones) that certain things get cut...but that's kind of the point.  Even in a TV series, you don't want to see everything onscreen, because it just becomes tedious, basically just a video game more than something that is constructed and written.  Across eight movies, they actually did a pretty good job of getting most of the important things from the books.  Sure, they left out things like Ravenclaw's Diadem and SPEW and the Deathday Party, but those were not consequential for the films themselves, and while they're lovely side diversions in a novel (which you can get away with in a book), there was nothing really unforgivable in the films themselves that needs to be corrected.  Any fan still complaining about something missing from the movies needs to either read the books again or get a life...you got a faithful adaptation, and one that worked cinematically (which is more than most fandoms can claim)-get over it.

The other part is that within this world, there's not much they can reinvent.  People will hate if they redesign Hogwarts or Diagon Alley from what we saw in the Warner Brothers film series, and Warner has built giant, billion-dollar theme parks around those films...they can't really afford to change the design of the castle or other iconic locations that much without discarding those lucrative properties.  Even the theme music, which blares from every corner of the park, is either straight from John Williams or heavily influenced by him-they can't mess with that either without totally upending the experience.  This wasn't an issue for the Fantastic Beasts franchise, which, while it used different composers that leant into Williams' original motif (as did the last five Harry Potter movies), existed within the same universe as the original eight films (so it was just adding on rather than expanding), but it's a complete problem in a remake.  How much "newness" can there be when you can't change the set design, costumes, visual effects structure, or music design?

It's also, I'm sorry to say, bound to fail creatively.  The really remarkable thing about the original Harry Potter series isn't that it's all one big masterpiece (I love it, but I'm the target audience and incapable of being impartial about such things), but that it was the best it could be.  They landed a really strong cast of actors as the main Hogwarts trio (Radcliffe, Watson, & Grint were up there with Judy Garland as Dorothy in terms of getting exactly the right actor for an iconic part), and they filled the faculty with an entire Royal Shakespeare Company's roster of thespians.  Any of the new children will suffer by comparison (they just will) because they're not only competing with nostalgia, they're also competing with a strong cast, and the same with the adult actors-are you really going to find a cast that's better than Ralph Fiennes, Julie Walters, Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Kenneth Branagh, & Imelda Staunton, cause I feel like that's going to be a challenge?  You might get some clever casting (I could easily see, say, Tom Felton playing Lucius Malfoy given his continued endorsement of the franchise on TikTok and in his memoir, which fans would eat up), but it's going to look cheap by comparison.

At best, the series will end up being The Hobbit or The Rings of Power, shows that were unfairly maligned because they were, in fact, good, but couldn't hold a candle to the originals.  And in reality, they'll likely be worse-those were new stories (ala Fantastic Beasts) that hadn't been told within this universe yet.  This is a direct remake, and will fail expectations, potentially causing WB to sink hundreds of millions into a property that will be lucrative (the curiosity factor will mean big ratings for the first season...there's no way that it won't...even I'm not committing to not tuning in to see what happens if it does become a thing, though I am still undecided if I'd actually watch), but also will look like a failure in the public's eye (and I suspect in the eye of stockholders) without something explainable like box office to point toward.

Perhaps Fantastic Beasts caused them to have a panic, but there are other ways here.  I get the logic of not letting IP this valuable just sit there, but come on-give some other types of fan service that people will be excited about instead.  There has long been demands for a Marauders prequel about a young James, Remus, Sirius, & Pettigrew and their time at Hogwarts, or a series about the four original founders of the school.  I get that it's perhaps a lost cause to get Cursed Child made with the original actors (Radcliffe, in particular, seems to actively not want to make it), but try throwing $50 million on his doorstep & greenlighting a passion project and see what happens...it's about as close to a guaranteed $1 billion box office as you can get in this world, and you could split it over two movies (one has to assume that they've tried this at this point, but I'll continue to harp on it until we get a firm announcement it ain't happening).  But a remake of the original series-no one wants it, it will be maligned, and there's so many better ideas.  That Warner can't think of them speaks to creative bankruptcy, which is hardly a good place to start with a television series.