The Changes An HBO ‘Harry Potter’ Show May Make From The Books And Movies

As Warner Bros. marches toward what looks like a seemingly inevitable return to the world of Harry Potter with a new TV series for HBO Max, I find myself wondering what might be changed this time around, if they’re re-adapting the books that were already made into movies.

Here are my predictions about what they may change, some of which is based on JK Rowling’s post-book editing, and the desire for more diverse casts in the modern TV era. I suspect all of these will unfortunately be controversial and we’ll start having “woke” debates again, but I think it’s important for the series to evolve the original story, given its close to 100% straight, white cast, something even JK Rowling seems to regret now.

Hermione Will Be Black – Back in 2016, black actress Noma Dumezweni was cast as Hermione in the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. She’s black and as such, received racist backlash for not being “faithful” to the books. Rowling defended her and said that she never outright said was Hermoine’s skin color was in the books. This does feel like one of Rowling’s “actually the book was more progressive than you thought” edits (and there are a few of these), but when it comes to recasting for the new show, it seems like one of the central trio will like be black, and my guess is that based on this history, it will be Hermione. We just saw something similar with the new Percy Jackson series coming to Disney, where Annabeth was cast with a black actress this time.

Dumbledore Will Be Gay – Perhaps the most famous of JK Rowling’s post-book edits was the revelation that Dumbledore was gay the entire time and previously had some sort of relationship with Grindelwald. Of course, if you read the books and saw the movies there was exactly zero indication of that, but in a new series, I bet they make this more explicit this time around so it doesn’t have to be seven layers of subtext you have to analyze for something that wasn’t there in the first place.

There Will Be Trans Representation – I predict whoever ends up running this show will push for trans representation in some form at Hogwarts. And I predict that JK Rowling, determined to prove her transphobic comments are not actually transphobic, will not prevent that from happening. We already saw this with the video game Hogwarts Legacy where you could both create a trans character as your own character, and a trans witch was given a prominent story role. Here, I’m not sure whether they’d take an existing book character and make them trans, or invent a new classmate who is, perhaps. But it will be difficult to make this feel like more than a token addition and like it’s not trying to pay penance on Rowling’s behalf.

Hermione Ends Up With Harry, Not Ron – Oh boy, okay, moving on from diversity issues now. Once again, this is a “regret” JK Rowling seems to have about her own story, as years after the final book was released back in 2014, she admitted that the Harry/Ginny and Hermione/Ron pairings didn’t really work, and Harry should have ended up with Hermione instead (something I always believed reading the books).

“I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment. That’s how it was conceived, really,” Rowling said in an interview. “For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione ended up with Ron.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” she adds. “I can hear the rage and fury it might cause some fans, but if I’m absolutely honest, distance has given me perspective on that. It was a choice I made for very personal reasons, not for reasons of credibility. Am I breaking people’s hearts by saying this? I hope not.”

So, now’s her chance to undo that, and develop the Harry and Hermione relationship into a romance rather than the brother/sister type pairing it ended up being. This would likely come more into play in the later books, but we see those seeds start much earlier, like when Ron is jealous of Hermione and Viktor in Goblet of Fire. So look for those clues early.

What else may change? I’m not sure, but those are my early predictions.

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