Remakes and reboots are the order of the day. There are few if any franchises that are completely safe, and as it turns out that includes Harry Potter. With the Fantastic Beasts film franchise all but officially dead, the plan for the future is to remake the Harry Potter movies, but as a prestige television series for HBO Max. The announcement was a shock to many fans, but apparently not to Rupert Grint, who called it a few months ago.
Back in January, Rupert Grint spoke with GQ and talked about the idea of the role of Ron Weasley getting recast in an eventual remake. Grint saw the possibility as inevitable, but also said that he thought a Harry Potter series, rather than a straight film remake, was the way to go. He explained…
I’d love to see Harry Potter be adapted into a TV show. I think it would really work. I’m sure the films will get remade, anyway.
Rupert Grint was sure that a remake would happen in one form or another, but not everybody was. The Harry Potter franchise is a big sprawling epic that covered eight films over a decade. It was so big that, while it would be understandable that a studio would want to remake that success, it was unclear if anybody would really be willing to undertake something of that scope. There was also a feeling from some that maybe the movies shouldn’t be touched
The plan, as far as it’s known at this point, is that the series will take the Game of Thrones route, and produce one season of the show for each book in the series. Assuming that we don’t see the first season for a couple more years, it will likely be about 15 years after the last movie that we see the beginning of the remake, which is about par for the course these days.
There is, at least on paper, some potential value to recreating the Harry Potter books as a TV series. The novels, especially the latter ones, are massive tomes and the movies were forced to cut out a lot in order to make the runtime of a movie work. A series would be able to delve deeper and include more details than the films ever could, which might at least give a series a chance to stand out.
Of course, it’s very early in development. So at this point there’s no guarantee that this series will ever actually happen. Even fans of the franchise aren’t entirely sold on the idea. Many were expecting an adaptation of the Harry Potter stage show, especially since there was at least an indication that such a film could see many of the original Harry Potter cast return. But Rupert Grint is almost certainly right; the remake will happen, it’s just a question of when and how.
