It's official, the Wizarding World is making a comeback in a long-form storytelling experiment that has never been explored in the franchise that has tried to come back multiple times without much success. Warner Bros. has officially confirmed the development of a Harry Potter television series reboot in development at Max, aiming to become a more faithful adaptation of the books throughout multiple seasons. New faces will be cast to play the roles made famous almost twenty years ago when the film series became an unstoppable force at movie theaters all over the world.
The franchise originally consisted of eight movies released over the course of a decade, telling the story of a young boy's (Daniel Radcliffe) journey to learning everything he could before facing his nemesis, Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) in a final showdown that would place everyone in the magical world in danger. But facing the Dark Lord wasn't the point of the series, with its true value residing in the lovable characters Harry met along the way, creating a found family that grew up with the boy who lived over time. After the final installment was released in 2011, Warner Bros. had an enormous intellectual property in their hands, and zero ideas regarding what to do with it.
The first attempt at bringing back Potter in a magical way was the franchise that began with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. The 2016 film starred Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander, a zoologist looking to rescue as many creatures as he could while he wrote a book about them in an effort to make his audience less ignorant, kinder, and more understanding towards the world around them. While the first installment was well-received, the two sequels that followed it were met with plenty of negative reviews, with the third movie outright becoming a box office "bombarda."
Addressing the Boggart in the Room
J. K. Rowling, the author behind the original novels, is attached as an executive producer for the upcoming television series that will fly on a broomstick through a story that was already told fairly recently. After all, when you have a universe with infinite possibilities for expansion and exploration, setting on the same tale all over again certainly sounds like a surprising choice. Perhaps if the studio were as bold with the franchise as the author is with the hate speech she communicates with, we could be getting new films and series that fans could enjoy without feeling like a Howler is opening right next to their ears. Her anti-trans remarks have already caused her profits to plummet over the last year, so moving forward with this series is certainly a risky move on Warner Bros' part.