Warner Bros just dropped an announcement about how they’re going to plot out this full Harry Potter reboot series that they’re doing. I’ll explain what’s going on and what it means for the new Harry Potter movies that they also talked about J.K. Rowling also said they’re continuing to do more Harry Potter movies, but said in different parts of the timeline.
They’ve been working on this for a long time, trying to lock J.K. Rowling down to a deal, like they had to get her to sign on the dotted line. And the important thing is, first, this is meant to be a full-on reboot of the original Harry Potter books, which is a bit of a surprise. Like, we knew they were doing a Harry Potter series. We were just kind of wondering what it would actually be about.
What Is Harry Potter Reboot Series About?
They are rebooting the events of Harry, Hermione, Ron, and all the main characters’ stories that we read during those original books, and they already greenlit the full series for order, which is way beyond what you normally get. This means they ordered beyond just the first episode, like there’s no pilot episode or just the first season; pretty much the entirety of all the original books has been greenlit into episodes.
As part of the deal that it took to get a Harry Potter series about the mainline characters again, they had to approve a ten-year run for the series, meaning at least ten seasons. They didn’t say exactly how many episodes per season, but it would be about what House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones was, meaning 8 to 10 episodes per season.
How Many Seasons In The Harry Potter Series?
Every single fan of the books, and there are millions, many millions of us now asking, there aren’t ten books, there are only seven books, so why are there ten seasons for seven books? This is because part of J.K. Rowling’s deal with Warner Brothers and HBO to get the series actually going to actually sign the deal was that they would cover every single thing in all the books without cutting out any plot, which is what happened with the original Harry Potter movies.
It’s actually happening with Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon right now too, to talk about George R.R. Martin, another major author who’s getting a lot of stuff cut out of his books to cram it into seasons. It is basically what happened with the original Harry Potter movies.
If you only watched the original movies with Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint, even though they split the events of the last book into two movies, they did eight movies for seven books. They still went up cutting a massive amount of stuff out of each book to cram the events of each one into a single movie, except for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And even then, with two full movies and about four and a half hours to do that one book, they still had to cut out a lot of stuff from Deathly Hallows.
So the Ten Seasons allows them to go full Deathly Hallows for all the books when they need to break the events of some of the larger books in the multiple seasons. And it also means they can start working on season two, Season three, and so on much, much sooner so that there aren’t massive breaks between the seasons, which is what just happened with House of the Dragon.
HBO waited until like the last possible minute after House of the Dragon Season One had been released, and had been proven a hit as everyone loved it. So that is great will do all the seasons now. But that means that they couldn’t start working on season 2 till way, way later. And that’s why we had to wait two years for House of the Dragon Season 2. And they don’t want that to happen with something like Harry Potter, which they know is going to be crazy popular.
How Many Harry Potter Seasons Per Book?
Zooming in hands on the book-time chart, the first two books are the shortest by far. So they can probably cover the events of Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets completely in season 1 and season 2. Prisoner of Azkaban is pretty close, they could probably cover that in a single season 3.
But you notice, starting with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the length of each book is more than doubles, which is where they need to start using two seasons to cover the events of each book. They might try to cram Goblet of Fire into a single season 4 or just give it a slightly longer episode run.
But the order of the Phenix would probably be season 5 and season 6. Half-Blood Prince would probably be season 7 and season 8, and then obviously, Deathly Hallows would be season 9 and season 10. That could wind up changing a little they could always wind up doing 11 seasons and using two seasons for Goblet of Fire.
But this is just the beginning, and they only have a loose plan for how long they’ll spend on each season. Like, remember, we’re talking ten years into the future now; a lot of can change in ten years.
Will The Original Harry Potter Characters Come Back?
The original actors’ Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint, as well as the other actors, have talked about how they feel about them doing a reboot in the past. Most of them, like Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, have said they never plan on coming back as characters in new movies later in the timeline.
So they don’t care quite as much about them actually rebooting their characters. Rupert Grint, though, was like one of the three mains who was like, “Oh yeah, totally I would love to come back and do an older version of Ron”. But it doesn’t really make sense to do that unless you also get the older Daniel Radcliffe to do older Harry Potter and Hermione to come back.
Before all this happened, many of us had way tamer theories about their Harry Potter series plans. Most of us assumed they would do a series set during a different part of the timeline, like a Marauder series. Because they could still feature most of the major characters from the main series, like Voldemort, and Dumbledore, just as younger versions of the characters.
That’s kind of what they did with the Fantastic Beasts movie. They kind of slowly turned into Dumbledore movies, even though they didn’t start out that way. A lot of us also thought that they might do a Severus Snape series or a young Voldemort series, or they go way back in the timeline and do a founder show about the four founders of Hogwarts, Helga Hufflepuff, Godric Gryffindor, Salazar Slytherin and Rowena Ravenclaw.
Will J.K. Rowling Write The Harry Potter Show?
One of the important details, though, is that J.K. Rowling will not be writing all the episodes herself. They’ll actually have teams of experienced showrunners and show writers actually working on the series, and she’ll just get approval on scripts, which is kind of how the situation with the original Harry Potter movie writing went, where she didn’t do the bulk of the writing of the movies herself. She just approved a lot of their scripts.
When they got to the Fantastic Beast movie, though, they actually did let her write most of those movies, which is why the movies felt a little bit weaker because she’s amazing at writing novels. The original Harry Potter books are amazing books, but she’s not a great screenwriter.
So I’m glad that they’re going back to the old method of writing the episodes for the series. I think that’ll just ultimately lead towards better quality actual episodes.
Other Harry Potter Movies And Series
But according to J.K. Rowling, they are still making new Harry Potter movies, and all of our theories have now been flipped. And now the new movies are going to be telling stories that are jumping around in the timeline.
J.K. Rowling was kind of noncommittal when asked about which events the next movies would cover. Warner Brothers already said that they don’t have any more Fantastic Beasts movies in development. That franchise is basically dead with the last Fantastic Beasts movie, and it sounds like they’ll do Marauders movies, a founder series of movies, and events like that. Or they go full Star Wars and try to do events much later in the timeline, much longer after the main characters have passed away.
House of the Dragon is doing this for Game of Thrones right now. But just like the HBO series, like their only series, they haven’t announced Game of Thrones movies or anything like that. Just jumping around in the timeline.
I just did another article for that Game of Thrones, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms trailer, which they also released when they released this Harry Potter reboot trailer. Like there was a bunch of different series they all announced at the same time with trailers.
Harry Potter Show Release Date
They did just bring back the entire Harry Potter cast from the movies for a reunion special on HBO Max a little while ago, but that was more of a glorified behind-the-scenes featurette, kind of like the cast of a Friends reunion. They didn’t come back to do a new movie or a new episode. They just sat around and talked about the movies, like a longer version of a Blu-ray DVD special feature.
Because they just announced the full series has been greenlit. It’s going to be at least 2025 before they can start getting episodes out. They haven’t announced any kind of casting yet as to who’s going to be playing all the characters. But there could be some of the original movie actors returning in different roles because they’re obviously much older now. They’d have to be playing different characters.
If you’re a fan of the DC series they did this was stuff like the Flash series in Modern Day, where they had John Wesley Shipp from the 90s Flash series come back as Barry’s father. So they could bring back some of the original actors just playing slightly different characters.
Rebooting Harry Potter Too Early?
But the thing is, obviously, it hasn’t been that long. That’s why a lot of fans got upset because it’s literally like right after they finished the movies; it hasn’t been that long.
Usually, when they reboot movies and Warner Brothers did just announce that they’re rebooting the original Lord of the Rings movies with new movies. Usually, they wait more than 20 years before trying to reboot things. We’re not talking about Spider-Man here and Sony. That’s the best example of them rebooting stuff right away with them rebooting from Tobey Maguire into Andrew Garfield and then very quickly, soon after into the Tom Holland version of Spider-Man.
Everybody’s now hoping for Harry Potter into the Potter-verse where like all the different characters come and they just say that they all happened in different universes where like Daniel Radcliffe comes back with whatever new version of Harry Potter they wind up casting.
Why Are Harry Potter Stars Not In Marvel Or Star Wars Movies?
The funny thing about that is that Daniel Radcliffe is like a hardcore Star Wars fan. A lot of these other franchises, so it would be funny to see him pop up in a Marvel movie or Star Wars movie.
One of the reasons why you don’t see that happening, though with Emma Watson too, is because they made so much money on Harry Potter, they’re so iconic as those characters so they don’t feel like they need to do movies just for the paycheck. You would get giant paychecks for these big comic book movies or big Star Wars movies.
So just enables them to be a little more selective with their roles and just do weirder stuff because they already have giant piles of money. This is how you get Daniel Radcliffe playing a farting corpse. And the funny thing about that movie, a big coincidence here is that the directors of that Farting Corpse Daniel Radcliffe movie are actually the directors who made Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was fantastic.
10 Year Of Harry Potter Show And Lord Of The Rings Reboot
Everybody let me know as to what you want them to do for this new ten-year-long plus Harry Potter series. Who do you want them to cast for actors? It’s still a little bit early to start talking about who they’re going to cast, but obviously, they’ll be much younger versions of the characters.
As for the Lord of the Rings reboots movies, they haven’t released any kind of teaser trailer for that yet, so it sounds like it’s going to be much longer before those start releasing. Elijah Wood also kind of did the same thing, like the Daniel Radcliffe thing where you’re asked about how you feel about the reboot, like “They are Rebooting The Lord of the Rings movies. What do you think about this?” He was actually pretty nice about it Like, “Oh, you know, I knew they would reboot them. Eventually, I hope they do a good job and hope this isn’t a big cash grab.
So with any luck, they’ll spend the time that they need to make this Harry Potter series actually good. Otherwise, the next ten years would be a slog. But as I said, because they just started, they’re going to be writing scripts now, starting actual work on the series. It’ll take them a couple of years before you get episodes.
So it would actually be a good long while before we get the next real trailer. I’ll probably wait till we start getting really big announcements or like really big trailers before I start doing some more articles.
Also Read: Harry Potter Films Filming Locations: Every Movie of the Franchise