‘Harry Potter’: HBO in Early Development of Live-Action Series Adapting One Book per Season
We are not done with the Harry Potter world yet, not by a long shot.
While everyone was anticipating the announcement of Warner Bros. bringing back the main trio from the eight-part Harry Potter film series, it seems like the studio had different plans. According to a major story by Bloomberg, David Zaslav and HBO chief Casey Bloys have convinced JK Rowling to okay an adaptation of the beloved book series into a live-action series; each season would adapt one of the books.
According to Bloomberg, this would be part of an overarching new streaming strategy by HBO’s parent company, the David Zaslav-run Warner Bros. Discovery, which will be announced next week. Reports of an HBO Max series centered in the Wizarding World came out two years ago, before Zaslav took over the studio and started implementing changes. It’s unknown if these two projects are related, or if the previously-reported one remains in any form of development. No creatives are attached yet, as the deal is yet to be finalized, but it looks like Rowling would not be involved day-to-day in the production; instead, she would receive a producer credit and likely have to give a thumbs up to key decisions, like picking the showrunner or the main cast.
If this comes to fruition, it will be HBO’s biggest endeavor since Game of Thrones. In a Richard Linklater-esque move, they will have to cast an eleven(-ish)-year-old main ensemble that would have to be attached to the series for seven years, at the very least; and to make sure they don’t grow out of the roles, the network would probably have to green light multiple seasons at once that would have to be shot back-to-back. They captured lighting in a bottle with the cast of the original films, both in terms of how true they were to the book counterparts, and the little recasting they had to do (Richard Harris’ early passing aside).
We are definitely years away from this coming to fruition, but with so much more to be explored in this world, it seems a bit of a question mark to revisit this specific story barely a decade after the original film run ended. (Funnily enough, this story was published a few hours after Dwayne Johnson announced a live-action Moana in the works, another project that was instantly panned online as “too soon”.)
It’s especially surprising that we are not getting the big film reunion with Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson — whatever they may ask in salaries, Warner Bros. Discovery will make up ten-fold in return. It’s almost impossible to believe they didn’t court each of them to come back, so the likely scenario is that at least one of them wasn’t game for it. (JK Rowling’s anti-trans comments may have played a factor in their decision.) In fact, Zaslav said during a shareholders’ event in November that the studio was interested in making more Harry Potter movies; in that same event he said they were also pursuing more Lord of the Rings movies, a project that is coming to fruition with Embracer Group partnering with New Line and WB to make new Middle-earth features, as Zaslav announced earlier this year.
More HBO streaming strategy news will be announced next week, so stay tuned.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
