HBO is ramping up the hype machine for its Harry Potter remake, but not everything about it is promising. There are ambitious plans for the series, which will likely have at least one season for each of the seven books (though whether some of the later, longer books get split up remains to be seen, as happened with The Deathly Hallows movies). It has a new cast of adults and kids in place, with Season 1 set to debut in 2027.
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The future beyond that, while there’s seemingly no question of the subsequent seasons happening, isn’t quite as clear-cut. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter ahead of HBO Max’s launch in the U.K., HBO chief Casey Bloys discussed how, while something like The Pitt can return for new episodes annually, that’s not realistic for some of the more effects-heavy series, specifically citing Harry Potter as one example of that:
“You have to balance it. For some of the bigger shows like Harry Potter or House of the Dragon, or The Last of Us, huge world-building shows, it would be nice to have those on an annual basis. But from a production point of view, it’s just not possible. It’s not that everybody involved is just taking their time and sitting around. These shows are complicated to do. In order to bring a show back on an annual basis, you do have to start from the beginning with people who know how to do it, people like [The Pitt executive producer] John Wells or Greg Berlanti, and it’s helpful if there are not dragons that need to be rendered, or zombies and things like that.”
Long Gaps Between Seasons Could Be A Problem For Harry Potter
This was already one of the big concerns regarding the Harry Potter TV show. Over the past five or six years, we’ve seen TV show production timelines increase massively. Some of that was due to Covid-19 and then the strikes, but even with those in the rearview mirror, that slowdown hasn’t changed. 18-24 months is becoming the new normal for large-scale, VFX-heavy series, and sometimes even longer.
This isn’t ideal for many reasons – it runs counter to what used to be a selling point of TV, which was your favorite shows returning annually, although it is understandable, given some of these productions now rival movies more than traditional television. But for Potter in particular, it could be a problem, because of how quickly its cast will age if it isn’t able to produce the seasons fast enough.
The movies managed this pretty well, with a decade between the first and last installment. But we’ve seen on TV how this can get a little out of control. Stranger Things, which released five seasons in nine years, is the biggest example of this, with the actors starting as kids and ending as adults, and that growth being a little more jarring to watch on screen.
If the gaps between seasons of Harry Potter get too long, then it’s plausible we’re looking at this running for significantly more than 10 years, and the kids ageing out of the roles too much. Hopefully that won’t be the case and HBO can make it work but, for all the excitement around Season 1, it’s fair to be a little worried about what comes after that.
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