The Biggest Problem With HBO Max’s ‘Harry Potter’ TV Show

I have been digesting the news about HBO Max (sorry, “Max”) announcing a decade-long commitment to a new Harry Potter series, re-adapting the original books with an entirely new cast and probably 3-4 times the total runtime of the original eight movies combined.

It is both an idea that seems somewhat creatively bankrupt but also like something that will inevitably draw a lot of viewership. But unlike similar IP-based projects, this feels like it comes with a risk that most other series do not.

No, this is not a JK Rowling thing. Yes, her transphobic comments are awful and her involvement here as an executive producer is not good, but if 12 million sales of Hogwarts Legacy taught us anything, those controversies simply do not break through to the larger public. Rather, I’m talking about the main problem with the series itself, in that it is not simply attempting to expand the world of Harry Potter, but to adapt beloved books and remake beloved movies full of beloved cast members that are still beloved to this day.

There is a reason that we have Rings of Power and not Amazon remaking Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings as a ten year-long series.

There is a reason Disney is not remaking the original Star Wars trilogy and instead focusing on everything that happens before and after.

There is a reason HBO is not going to remake Game of Thrones five years from now, and instead we’ll just be getting other stories set in different time periods.

Sure, we do see this sometimes. Percy Jackson being remade comes to mind, but that was a two film series ten years ago and while a great IP, nowhere near the level of scale of any of these others, which is why a new Disney Plus series doesn’t seem like a bad idea necessarily.

But doing not just a Harry Potter show, but a ten year-long Harry Potter show really, really commits to the idea that the books aren’t enough and the movies aren’t enough and people want to restart all this just ten years later and watch it run for another ten years after that. You just do not see this happen among other mega-franchises, and there is a good reason for that.

Why would this be a show anyone would talk about week to week? There are no twists, no surprises to be found for the vast majority of the audience. It will mostly be debates about what did or didn’t get changed from the movies, which is far less entertaining.

My guess is the pitch here to execs was Harry Potter for a “new generation” who did not grow up with the Radcliffe/Watson/Grint version, but I mean, those films still hold up well (and are available on the same damn platform this show is airing on), and of course you can read the books any time. This just seems like a purely cash-squeezing venture with zero creative purpose to it, and an 50-80 hours series seems like it will no doubt put a lot of the bloat back into the books that the movies cut out, including some stuff that probably should have been cut.

Do I think a lot of people will watch this, at least initially? Yes. Do I think this will be better than the books or the first time we did this with the movies? Almost certainly not, especially if JK Rowling is meddling a bunch in her current state. But there’s no stopping the Hogwarts Express, and I guess we’ll just have to see.

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