screenrant: Now, with the Harry Potter TV show’s release date nowhere in sight, Heyman provides an update to Total Film (via GamesRadar) regarding the status of the series and what audiences can expect. While it doesn’t sound like the show will be coming anytime soon, the producer does tease that this new format will allow for a more faithful adaptation. Check out Heyman’s full comment below:
“[On Harry Potter] It’s early days. We haven’t even hired a writer to begin writing. It’s a bit early. But hopefully [it will be] something that’s very special, and gives us an opportunity to see the books, and to enjoy a series which explores the books more deeply.”
It is expected that the Harry Potter TV series will premiere on Max (formerly HBO Max) sometime between 2025 to 2026.
Anyone else remember that the first Harry Potter movie was heavily criticized because it was too faithful to the book?
It was compared to the Lord of the Rings which was released the same year, and which became the good standard for adapting fantasy novels to the screen.
I think the main problem the TV show will face is that throughout the series, the novels evolve wildly in tone and sophistication. The early novels are cartoonish. The Dursleys are clownishly villainous, dead people can be ghosts, Dobby … exists, Voldemort is a toothless joke that can can be defeated just by being touched by Harry Potter.
The later novels abandon the abject child abuse of the Dursleys, they show that Voldemort’s villainy is the serious dystopian threat of fascism, and we just sort of put aside that ghosts and portraits of dead people are a thing if it’s any dead character we care about.
This story’s evolution in sophistication worked well for books because the readers literally grew up alongside the novels.
Maybe it will work for the TV series as well.
The thing is, Philosopher’s Stone is short and straightforward enough that the entire book can reasonably be fitted into one movie without leaving out too much details, and every book after that just gets longer and more complicated so the movies have to allocate for time.
A miniseries is probably a good idea just because there’s more time to elaborate on things, but I think due to various reasons, Harry Potter just isn’t as popular as it was when the movies came out nowadays.
No, if anything I remember more complaints about the stuff it left out. Like Peeves, or the missing potions challenge near the end that was Hermione’s to solve (Ron had the chess challenge, which was kept).
I’d imagine a fair amount of retconning will be in order to clear out the… inconsistencies and give the world a more uniform form. Isn’t the series already greenlit for seven seasons? If so, that’s more than enough time to grow the characters over time. The only things that need to be fixed are the obvious plotholes and contradictions.
In what way? They’re wildly dissimilar.