Harry Potter and HBO's Inevitable Reboot Failure
Florida Man vs. HBO beating a dead centaur
The Aughts really won’t die, will they? Everyone needs a bite at the 2000s apple. Disney is remaking 2002’s Lilo & Stitch. Amazon Prime is filming the third season of The Rings of Power, a prequel to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003). Now, HBO needs its turn at the Yule Ball. In 2026, HBO’s streaming service Max plans on piloting its reboot of the Harry Potter franchise. Instead of another film series, HBO will be releasing a television show, whereby each season corresponds to one of the seven books written by JK Rowling.
For some reason … the Boy Who Lived really won’t die.
Harry Potter and Me
The Books and Films
I have a complicated history with Harry Potter. I was the prime age for the release of all the films and most of the books. The first book Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone came out in June 1997, seven months before I was born in January 1998. The film adaptation of that book came out in 2001, when I was 3 years old. The seventh and final book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out in 2007, when I was 9 years old. The eighth and final film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 came out in 2011, when I was 13 years old.
This British book/film franchise dominated my childhood and early adolescence just as Star Wars would have dominated the childhoods of kids growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Ironically, the Star Wars prequels were coming out at the same time as the Harry Potter films and books, but Harry Potter was NEW. The prequels were BAD. From my perspective as a child at that time, Harry Potter had much more control over the public consciousness than Star Wars did. For zillennials, the only franchise that matched that of Harry Potter was Pokémon with its video games, anime series, and trading cards.
What Would Normal People Do
I was never a huge fan of Harry Potter, but my family still participated in that my brother and I read the books. As a young boy, I was a fan of Legos, and I remember Harry Potter having a prominent presence in my Lego collection alongside Star Wars. My family would see the movies whenever they came out in theaters, but — for some reason — we still needed to go against the grain of these cultural trends. My father always had the edict, “What would normal people do?” (WWNDP)’
This credo from my father originated in the context of going to the Orlando theme parks, which we visited probably once every other year as Florida residents. The goal of the WWNPD edict is to avoid long lines. Do you go to Disney World when it is 55 degrees during Christmas time? No way. Go to Disney World in peak humidity in August. It helps if it starts raining too.
For us, this philosophy eventually applied to Harry Potter. In 2007, massive hype was building for the release of the final book in the series Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which would come out on July 21. Chain bookstores like Barnes & Noble would hold massive events for the midnight release of this eagerly awaited book. You needed to register. You needed wristbands with special colors. People came dressed as characters from the series.
On that fateful night in July 2007, my brother and I wanted to get the book as did every other adolescent in the United States. We lived very close to the Barnes & Noble in Naples, Florida, but my father had the brilliant idea of not going there because … what would normal people do? Normal Harry Potter fans dress up as Dumbledore and Hermione and go to the Barnes & Noble. Instead, my father took us to the Naples location of Super Walmart, which was open 24/7. Therefore, it would have a midnight release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in the Walmart book section just as Barnes & Noble did. These Harry Potter dorks would never think to pull up to the Super Walmart by Interstate 75 at 12:15 AM — yet my father, my brother, and I did.
Alas, my father’s intuition was correct. Harry Potter dorks didn’t go to Super Walmart. We entered the vast, concrete, indoor, consumerist landscape of Super Walmart — littered with enough cheap Chinese crap to make Donald Trump’s and Tucker Carlson’s heads spin. We walked to the book section. There, piles of orange-covered copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows towered over us. Nobody was waiting in line. We could have taken as many as we wanted and, then, have scalped them outside in the parking lot of the Barnes & Noble in Naples. In reality, was my father correct? Sure, we got two copies of the book for both my brother and me without any waiting, but — for those nerds camping outside Barnes & Noble — was it really ever about the book? Or was the real Harry Potter the friends we made along way?
I was only nine years old, but — in that line at Barnes & Noble — probably stood a girl named Brittany dressed as Hermione. Okay, well, Brittany wasn’t technically a girl at this point in Year of Our Lord 2007. Again, she was 21 years old. She was back home in Florida after her junior year at Dartmouth. She was 11 years old in 1997 when she read the first book Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, but she always make sure to tell you that it was only The Sorcerer’s Stone for the American release. You know they call it The Philosopher’s Stone in every other country? Brittany was the same age as Harry, Ron, and Hermione when they first stepped foot on the campus of Hogwarts in that 1997 book. She WAS them! More specifically, she WAS Hermione. Maybe Brittany was never the most popular girl, but she could relate to high-achieving Hermione Granger! Finally! A heroine for Brittany!
At Dartmouth, Brittany is captain of the quidditch team. You know they play quidditch at college? Brittany also leads tours of Dartmouth campus, and she makes sure to tell every prospective applicant about the wonders of college quidditch. Magic can be real, folks! It was 2007, man! There was no Great Recession yet. Brittany was gearing up for the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. She ran Students for Obama! What a magical time in the United States!
Now, after a decade of adolescence, her beloved journey with Harry, Ron, and Hermione was ending. With it, her childhood was ending too, so there she waits in line at the Barnes & Noble. Perhaps she waits there with her friends from college. For Brittany, it was never about getting the book. For Brittany, it was about the para-social connection with the kids in Hogwarts and the other people in the line. My father, my brother, and I completely denuded the magic of the seventh Harry Potter book. No magical pilgrimage to Barnes & Noble at midnight. Just an empty parking lot outside a behemoth Super Walmart four miles inland by the interstate.
Eighteen long years have passed since the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Now, I am writing about the imminent failures of this new Harry Potter reboot, but perhaps I am neutering the magic of this Harry Potter experience. Brittany is now 39 years old. She has made partner at McKinsey in New York City. She is married with kids. Imagine how excited she might be to relive the magic of Harry Potter with her kids on this new HBO series! Sorry, Brittany.
However, as a good little McKinsey drone in Manhattan, Brittany will have to acknowledge the sins of a certain transphobic writer before she watches the series, but she can separate the art from the artist. She will need to warn her children of She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named … JK Rowling, of course! But I trust that Brittany can do that!
New Casting Announcements for HBO’s Harry Potter
The thought of the upcoming reboot of Harry Potter re-entered my mind earlier this month when HBO began announcing some big casting decisions. The biggest announcement came with John Lithgow as Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore. British actress Janet McTeer will be portraying Minerva McGonagall, the Hogwarts Transfiguration professor and head of Gryffindor House — home to Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger. British actor Paapa Essiedu will be portraying Severus Snape, the enigmatic professor of Potions at Hogwarts.
HBO has not made any other major casting announcements yet, but these three actors will have big shoes to fill. John Lithgow, an American, will be succeeding acclaimed Irish actors Richard Harris and Michael Gambon, who both portrayed Albus Dumbledore in the original films. Harris portrayed Dumbledore for the first two films until his death in 2002. Gambon took over the role for the rest of the series. As Minerva McGonagall, Janet McTeer will be succeeding actress Maggie Smith, another acclaimed British performer.
Fans are doubting these actors’ abilities of taking over these iconic roles (although American John Lithgow can fake a good English accent), and the most controversy arose with the casting of Severus Snape. Another beloved British actor, Alan Rickman, portrayed Severus Snape in the original series. As you can see in the tweet above, the new actor of Severus Snape — Paapa Essiedu — is black. Of course, this choice had to stir up controversy in the Year of Our Lord 2025.
Some reactionary people claimed that DEI was going TOO FAR. Out of every character from Harry Potter to make non-white, Severus Snape should be one of the LAST. The books specifically describe him as pale. How dare HBO! They aren’t staying faithful to the books and the writing of JK Rowling! Okay, I hate JK Rowling, but um … Snape isn’t black! That’s for damn sure! Some progressive fans of Harry Potter rationalized their opposition to Paapa Essiedu by saying that HBO was putting this man in a DANGEROUS position. Essiedu would now have to suffer from the arrows of the online mobs. You are unnecessarily making him vulnerable to racist invective from fascist Twitter!
I have no interest in giving a TAKE on a having a black Severus Snape. That casting decision will have no influence on the imminent failure of HBO’s Harry Potter. We have plenty of other factors at play.
Why HBO’s Harry Potter Will Fail
The Problem of Pacing
The Harry Potter film series never received as much critical acclaim as the contemporaneous trilogy The Lord of the Rings, but the Harry Potter films were still pretty good. Some are better than others, but there isn’t a bad film in the series. We need to acknowledge the great feat that Warner Brothers achieved by pulling off eight films in a series with consistent quality. Not only did they release eight films, but they also did so with extremely quick turnover. These eight films came out over a span of 10 years from 2001 to 2011. The biggest gap was only 24 months between the the fifth film The Order of the Phoenix in July 2007 and the sixth film The Half-Blood Prince in July 2009.
These films had a massive ensemble cast, many of whom played major roles in all eight films. Alan Rickman dedicated his entire career for 10 years to portraying Severus Snape, but it’s one thing to commit to Alan Rickman for 10 years. Rickman was a known quantity. Warner Brothers knew that he was a good actor. The much bigger challenge in casting came when Warner Brothers need to take a chance on the child actor trio of Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley), and Emma Watson (Hermione Granger). Respectively, at the release of the first film, they were 12 years old, 13 years old, and 11 years old. Warner Brothers hit the jackpot when these child actors ended up being good in their late teens and early twenties. Moreover, a lot of factors have to fall into the exact right place to get an ensemble cast to work as well as it did in the original Harry Potter films.
Ensemble casts in long-running prestige television shows can obviously work out. HBO has already done it with The Sopranos (1999-2007) and Game of Thrones (2011-2019), but how many times does it not work out? The HBO shows The Sopranos and Game of Thrones are the exceptions. Arguably, those shows are the two most successful shows in HBO history. In fact, Game of Thrones seems like a good analog. Both Harry Potter and Game of Thrones are wide, sprawling fantasy universes with large ensemble casts. Both need high budgets to put on screen. The only big difference is that Harry Potter has no gratuitous incest scenes.
Beyond not having pornography veiled as prestige television, the Harry Potter reboot will not face the fundamental issue that Game of Thrones had. HBO already has all the source material of Harry Potter, and we have had it for 18 years! HBO also already knows that those stories are successful on screen as seen in both the film series and their massive presence in Universal theme parks across the world. On the other hand, show runners David Benioff and David Weiss had to create the final seasons of Game of Thrones without any source material because of the lack of work ethic of an old, bearded hermit in New Mexico named George R.R. Martin.
However, Harry Potter has one limitation that most other prestige HBO shows do not usually have. Due to the nature of the high production value of many HBO shows, they can take a while to make if they are good. For example, Succession had two-year gaps between the second season and the third season and, then, between the third season and the fourth season. Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm has the most notoriety with long gaps between seasons. Between the 8th season (2011) and the 9th season (2017), six years passed. Between the 11th season (2021) and the 12th and final season (2024), three years passed.
HBO cannot do this with Harry Potter. At the premiere of Curb Your Enthusiasm in 2000, Larry David was already an old man, and — when your series depends on rich, retired adults — you can take these long hiatuses. Due to the nature of the plot of the Harry Potter series, HBO cannot take much longer than one year between the seasons. The pacing of the show cannot outpace the physical development of the actors. We do not want a Harry Potter with a prominent Adam’s apple and a 5-o’clock shadow in the Chamber of Secrets.
Well, didn’t the film series pull this off? Yes, it did, but each of the films was less than three hours. The longest one was Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) at 2 hours and 41 minutes. It’s much easier to turn around a decent film in less than two years if you are only producing 150 minutes. As for HBO television shows, they usually have 8-10 episodes of 60-minute runtimes. We are now quadrupling how much filming must occur for Harry Potter.
Something has to give. Either HBO sacrifices quality for quick turn-around, or HBO has Harry with a beard in the Chamber of Secrets. Neither of those outcomes are good. Perhaps the latter is better, but — even in this scenario — the series will fail for another reason. For media, we do not define success just as quality. To succeed, this series must have cultural impact. Both outcomes that I just laid out will fail in this effort. A bad series that releases a new season every year will fail because it is bad.
A good series that takes breaks of two or three years will fail because it will not constantly be entering the cultural zeitgeist. Much of Harry Potter’s success in the 2000s came from the frequency with which Warner Brothers was releasing films and JK Rowling was publishing the books. We never went a full year without new Harry Potter content. Warner Brothers and JK Rowling were barraging us with Hogwarts stories. In the 2000s, we also saw this phenomenon with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which came out in succession in 2001, 2002, and 2003. For these reasons, Denis Villeneuve’s adaptations of Frank Herbert’s Dune series never have had a hold on cinema that either Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings did even though those two Dune films have had success. By March 2024, when Dune: Part Two came out, people had already forgotten about the first film. We do not even know yet when Villeneuve will release the third film Dune: Messiah.
The Hobbit Problem
Over the past few years, I have become doubtful of television as a medium. We are just inundated with it. People claim everything is “good”, but I don’t know what will last and what is ephemeral pixie dust in the air. In theory, the medium of television could perfectly serve the adaptation of novels. We saw this with Game of Thrones, but shouldn’t Game of Thrones show us the problem with adapting novels to television? We had a major decline in quality in the final two seasons. It is very hard for a television show to maintain quality over eight years as HBO will have to do with Harry Potter. We cannot just put the decline of Game of Thrones on the shoulders of George R.R. Martin. David Benioff and David Weiss are big boys. You can write decent content even if you have little guidance from the hermit in New Mexico.
Whenever a studio adapts a book into a film, fans of the book almost always assert that the book is BETTER. Those soulless Hollywood suits cut out so much of the original content! Well, in some instances, maybe the content was bad. This is the sort of logic that comes from middle school English teachers who don’t want you to watch the 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird before your big test. I think that this is true with Harry Potter. These books do not have the best writing, and the length of each one always shocked me. There’s no way Rowling needed all those 766 pages of The Order of the Phoenix to get her point across. So much of it is filler, and I think that Warner Brothers did a good job at compressing these excessively long tomes of fantasy slop for young adults.
Perhaps we can use the three four-hour extended cuts of The Lord of the Rings films, but J.R.R. Tolkein’s writing was much better than that of J.K. Rowling. It had way less filler, so Peter Jackson had much more reason to release a four-hour film for each of the three volumes of the book. The Tolkein universe saw this exact issue of over-writing when Jackson produced three film adaptations of The Hobbit from 2012 to 2014. Jackson was producing a film trilogy of similar length to The Lord of the Rings, but the 1955 book The Lord of the Rings had 1077 pages. The 1937 book The Hobbit only had 310 pages, so Jackson had to create his own content to make the three lucrative films that New Line Cinemas wanted in The Hobbit trilogy.
I fear that HBO’s Harry Potter reboot will see the same decline in quality that we saw from Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings to The Hobbit a decade later. HBO is likely quadrupling the amount of screen time of Harry Potter for this television adaptation. Warner Brothers already cut out the filler parts of the books, but HBO will need to put them back in to fill out a series of 10 episodes of 60 minutes.
This television adaptation makes me think what would have happened if JK Rowling published Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 2025 instead of 1997. Would we have never gotten a film series? Would we have just gotten streaming slop right out of the gate? In an even scarier universe, would a studio have not wanted Peter Jackson to make three films in The Lord of the Rings if we were adapting it in 2025? Would we have gotten a six-season series on Amazon Prime starting with The Hobbit adaptation? What about James Bond? In what creative ways, will Amazon butcher that beloved film franchise in the next few years?
We likely will never get sprawling, beloved film series like Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings again. At least it won’t happen as long as HBO Max and Amazon Prime are producing streaming slop like Harry Potter and The Rings of Power.