Harry Potter Being Rebooted As A Television Series?
Rupert Grint says he'd love to see Harry Potter rebooted in a television series.
Harry Potter is a series where fans and creators alike have been wondering whether the magic is still alive or not. Attempts to spin the series off with the Fantastic Beasts films seem to have stalled out, and series creator J.K. Rowling keeps issuing transphobic tweets that have threatened the bottom line of the new blockbuster game Hogwarts Legacy. It seems the best move for the franchise would be to reboot it entirely, and in a recent GQ interview, Ron Weasley star Rupert Grint expressed that he’d prefer the reboot to happen on the small screen, saying, “I’d love to see Harry Potter be adapted into a TV show.”
One of the reasons that Grint has a Harry Potter reboot on the brain is that he believes such a reboot is inevitable, saying in the interview, “I’m sure the films will get remade, anyway.” This is a belief previously expressed by his franchise costars Daniel Radcliffe and Tom Felton. However, Grint seems to be the primary voice calling for such a reboot to be on TV rather than film, saying, “I think it would really work.”
A Harry Potter television reboot might work particularly well on HBO Max, which is where such a Warner Bros. production would inevitably stream. In James Gunn’s recent announcement for future DCU content, he pointed out that they were casting people who could alternate between appearing in DC movies and TV shows. Between casting potentially big names and drawing on decent budgets, Gunn hopes audiences won’t see the TV shows as less than their film counterparts, and if the network is willing to take this approach with Harry Potter, we could get small-screen antics just as explosively magical as any that we have seen on the big screen.
A natural advantage that a Harry Potter television reboot would have over a film reboot is the added runtime needed to bring the original books’ narrative to life. The relatively short running time of movies means that many of the little details from each book get lost, resulting in the final book being split into two different films that still left out many key details from the original text. If an entire season could be devoted to each book, then fans would get to see major events from the books depicted onscreen for the first time (such as Hermione creating SPEW, the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare).
The final benefit of a Harry potter television reboot is that it would give different creators the chance to add their own unique flourishes to the universe, much like Alfonso Cuarón did when directing the wonderfully-spooky Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The last four Harry Potter movies as well as all of the Fantastic Beasts films have been directed by David Yates, which means audiences were stuck with very little stylistic variety (and, if we’re being honest, some very weak-sauce magical duels). Ultimately, it seems that Rupert Grint was right: a Harry Potter reboot show would be the best way to adapt more of the books and bring more creative visions into the Wizarding World, all while helping to introduce this unique kind of magic to a new generation.
