Remaking Harry Potter Is A Terrible Idea
BY
STACEY HENLEY
Harry Potter is getting a seven season television adaptation that retells the movies, with JK Rowling heavily involved. What's the point in any of it?
News that Harry Potter is getting a HBO television reboot feels emblematic of where our current media culture is right now. Harry Potter is now a highly controversial franchise, thanks almost entirely to creator JK Rowling’s stance on trans people, which in turn has dredged up the problematic undertones of her Jewish-caricature bankers and Asian characters named Cho Chang who is excellent at Maths, or Irish character Seamus Finnegan who is stupid, dirty, and often causes explosions while trying to brew alcohol. Mostly though, it’s emblematic because it’s boring.
Leaving aside your, my, or anyone else’s thoughts on Harry Potter as a political entity, this is just a dull idea. The proposed TV series will run for seven seasons, each one dedicated to a book. The last movie came out barely a decade ago in 2011, and they’re still regularly shown on TV around Christmas and air frequent marathons. Why do the exact same thing again? At least Hogwarts Legacy, for all its flaws, was a new idea.
This might be where Rowling’s public image finally comes back to bite her. An easy way to make money would be to bring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson back and do a ‘where are they now’ continuation with Harry as a Wizard FBI agent, just as the books ended. But given all three have publicly criticised Rowling and publicly stated their support for trans rights, and that JK Rowling is actively involved in this new show, those three seem happy to remain on muggle shores.
Then there’s the fact that Rowling is mentioned at all. Let’s ignore what that means from a social justice perspective (my colleague Tessa Kaur has an excellent breakdown of that) and instead look at it from a production point of view. Recently, The Last of Us creator Neil Druckmann was heavily involved in the game’s HBO adaptation, and as a result we see a lot of shot for shot recreations of scenes and characters we already know so well.
Some episodes expanded on things heavily, like Long, Long Time, but mostly it’s just the game, exactly as the game looked. Considering Rowling was also heavily involved in the movies, and her closeness to the show won’t allow it to interrogate any of her worst writing traits, you have to wonder what the point of the series is at all.
Then, we come back to the answer - it’s money. Hogwarts Legacy made money. Harry Potter merchandise still makes lots of money. Ergo, the TV series will make money. But I’m not sure that’s so simple either. The Fantastic Beasts movies declined at the box office to the point where the fourth and fifth movies were quietly dropped, and I’m not sure who the target audience for this is. There are a lot of Harry Potter obsessed adults but what they love most of all is their own nostalgia.
Hogwarts Legacy let them live out their dreams of, well, going to school, I guess. It’s hard to see that many people with Harry Potter tattoos or children named Luna and Draco caring about the stories they’ve already seen a million times but this time without the actors they love. Then you get to the fact the books are wildly different in length, meaning the first series will need a lot of padding and not start off on the strongest foot. Amazon thought Lord of the Rings was too big to fail, but The Rings of Power has been average at best in both quality and viewership, and that’s without any controversy.
It’s easy to buy a video game because of anti-wokeness. There’s a huge crossover online between those who live their lives specifically to be against a thing, and those who play video games. Many of the internet’s most reactionary content creators have their roots in video games, so it’s natural that they support Hogwarts Legacy. Partially because trans people asked them not to, and partially because it’s a triple-A game. That’s harder with a HBO show, very few are going to keep up with a subpar magic high school drama full of padding and where they’ve already seen the movie version tell the story much slicker, just to own the libs.
The name alone will ensure the Harry Potter TV show does kind of well, at least to begin with. But it won’t attract the rampant fanbase who flock to the Wizarding World theme park to buy their personalised wands, nor will it have much sway with a general audience who’ve already seen the movies and read the books. Later series, which expand on what the movies had to trim, may have potential, but by then the first couple of thin books may have already turned fans off.
Looking only at the cash flow, you can see why ‘more Harry Potter’ makes sense. But remaking popular movies that many people still watch regularly, failing to appeal to the most obsessed audience by only showing them what they’ve seen before, and attaching the highly controversial creator to ensure bad publicity and a lack of original ideas is the worst way to go about ‘more Harry Potter’. If you hate trans people and are going to force yourself to watch it to win some made up culture war, you’re in for a bumpy ride.
