Harry Potter is coming to HBO Max this Christmas, and the head of HBO has announced what fans can expect from the franchise. The series will retell the stories from the seven books, and thanks to its long-form storytelling, it can tell parts of the novels that the movies couldn’t thanks to the fact it had to adapt an entire book into a two-hour film. This is the most exciting thing about the new HBO Max series since it means that there are countless things readers loved that they can finally get a chance to see in the television adaptation.
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While this is exciting, don’t expect HBO to do anything other than adapting the books. In an interview with the Radio Times, the chairman and CEO of HBO and Max Content, Casey Bloys, talked about the upcoming franchise. When asked if this will create a shred universe on the streaming service, he shot that down instantly. “First of all, we’ll be so busy, adapting the books is going to be a long process,” Bloys said. “So, no, the idea is not to go into this and turn it into, you know, a DC or a Marvel, or anything like that. The idea is to go in and do the books.”
Harry Potter Could Become a Huge Franchise Similar to Game of Thrones
It really is a good thing that HBO Max is only concerned with the Harry Potter books for now. However, it is disappointing to hear there are no future plans to expand the franchise into something bigger, similar to Knight of the Seven Kingdoms furthering the Game of Thrones franchise. The good news is that HBO Max is concerned with making the best Harry Potter series that it can, and there is no reason to overload the series with things that look like it is just building to something new in the future.
The most important thing for HBO Max to do with Harry Potter is to ensure that the series retells the books in a way that readers might have only dreamed about in the movie adaptations. This means that all the attention from the writers, showrunners, actors, and HBO executives need to be focused on the series. However, that does not mean that the future can’t see even more from the world of Harry Potter.
If anything, the Fantastic Beasts franchise showed how there were great stories to tell outside Harry and his friends, although that franchise died thanks to some questionable decisions that turned off viewers. That said, there are lots of other stories, including the tales of The Marauders, that could warrant their own spin-off series, not to mention the later years with an adult Harry Potter as an Auror. Yes, it is way too early to think about these spin-off opportunities, but HBO Max has to be thinking of a way to capitalize on what might be a revival of the Harry Potter fandom for the future.
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