HBO is pressing ahead with ambitious plans for Harry Potter, and it’s also avoiding some of the franchise’s past mistakes. While the movies were a global phenomenon, just like the books were before (and alongside) them, the Harry Potter TV show will be attempting to do even greater justice to the source material. With a season for each book, and likely eight episodes per season, there’s a lot of room to expand beyond the films and even go off-page, and there’s an approximately 10-year project to bring these stories to life on the small screen.
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As it stands, though, those plans do not include spinoffs. It’d be fair to assume, given HBO and its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, have a lot of franchises already, that similar treatment would be on the table for its Wizarding World redo. However, at an upfronts event in Brazil [via Omelete], HBO’s CEO Casey Bloys confirmed that the focus is very much on the Harry Potter remake, and there are no plans to develop any offshoots.
Harry Potter Spinoffs Are Inevitable (Eventually)
The lack of expansion beyond the core stories is a good thing. For starters, HBO needs to keep the focus on getting the Harry Potter reboot right. That’s the most important part of this, and anything else should be secondary. There’s a lot at stake with the remake, and there’ll be very high levels of pressure and expectation, so it can’t be putting the cart before the horse thestral and thinking too far ahead in terms of franchise planning. Even in the Wizarding World, you need to learn to walk before you can fly.
This is also good for avoiding some of the mistakes with WB’s previous attempts at expanding the Wizarding World with Fantastic Beasts. While the first movie was a fun adventure, the sequels were marred by myriad on-screen issues, bad reviews, poor box office performance, and off-screen controversies. They failed to strike the right balance between telling new stories and filling in more of Harry Potter lore, and while there were originally ambitious plans for five movies, only three happened – and the other two almost certainly never will (and that’s partly why we’re getting a remake of the original books). That shows just how wrong spinoffs can go, and how quickly it can happen, so it’s good that HBO is being patient.
Still, it seems unthinkable that there won’t be Harry Potter spinoffs eventually. There’s plenty to potentially explore with the Wizarding World, and IPs are king. HBO and its parent company are expanding things like DC and Game of Thrones, so there’s no reason to think this will be any different. For instance, HBO could very easily please a lot of fans by making a TV show about the Marauders, perhaps leading into the first Order of the Phoenix and initial war against Lord Voldemort. But that should only happen if and when the remake is a proven success, which, given it won’t debut for another couple of years, isn’t going to be anytime soon.
The Harry Potter remake will debut on HBO and HBO Max sometime in 2027.
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