HBO's Harry Potter show will be a huge hit, and there's nothing anyone can do about it

HBO is working on a new TV show based on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series, about a kid who lives an unhappy life with his cruel aunt and uncle until he finds out he’s a wizard and gets whisked away to a magical boarding school where he makes friends, develops his powers, and even saves the world.

The Harry Potter books are the most successful novels of the 21st century. The movies based on the books, which came out between 2001 and 2011, are modern classics. And that’s not even getting into other off-shoots like the stage show, the video games, or the spin-off movies.

This new TV series seems destined for similar success, but if you look online, you’ll see a lot of people arguing that it’s a bad idea, or that the show is doomed to fail. I can’t guarantee the Harry Potter show will please everyone — in fact, I’m sure it won’t — but I would bet every dollar I have that it’s going to be a monster success, whatever online narratives would have you believe.

Do we NEED a new version of the Harry Potter story?

The redundant problem of redundancy

One of the most common criticisms you’ll see of the new Harry Potter show online is that it’s redundant. There’s no point in making a TV series, the argument goes, when the movies aren’t that old and already covered the story from the books passably well. Not enough will be added.

The new show will incorporate characters and plot threads that were cut from the movies, so it won’t be exactly the same, but this is still the criticism I agree with the most. Speaking as a giant nerd who’s read all the books and watched all the movies (possibly more than once, don’t tell anyone), I can say that pretty much everything important made its way onscreen. It’s true that things were cut, but not nearly so much that the story was unrecognizable or unsatisfactory, and I expect the TV series to cover much of the same ground.

The rub is that this won’t matter for most people. Critics (me included) like to complain about Hollywood’s obsession with remakes and reboots, but the reality is that studios reheat their old nachos so often because people keep eating them. You don’t have to look hard to find examples. Wednesday, a warmed-over version of the century-old Addams Family franchise, is one of the most popular shows on Netflix. Disney has found huge success with live-action remakes of its own animated classics, with movies like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin bringing in over a billion dollars each at the box office. The James Bond, Star Trek, and Batman franchises have been going strong onscreen for over 60 years. The Dune movies are hugely exciting, but that story was already told in a Dune movie in 1984.

People like what they know and Hollywood is happy to give it to them. The Harry Potter show should stick to this pattern. If you want to put a number on it, the trailer (above) became the most watched first trailer for any program in the history of HBO or HBO Max. Clearly, people are interested.

Harry Potter and the Curse of the Problematic Discourse

This franchise takes it from all sides

While it would have been hard to predict this a decade ago, the Harry Potter series has also become a lightning rod for political discourse. On the one side, author J.K. Rowling has made headlines in recent years for speaking out against the rights of trans people, which disappointed fans who saw the Harry Potter series as promoting ideas of inclusion and acceptance. On the other side, some fans have been upset by the fact that HBO’s Harry Potter show has cast Paapa Essiedu, a Black actor, in the role of Severus Snape, to the point where Essiedu has received death threats.

These are both hot button issues that a studio like HBO would rather avoid. But while I expect to see plenty of discourse around these topics in years to come, I doubt it will have much effect on viewership. More likely, the show will have the same fate as the 2023 Harry Potter video game Hogwarts Legacy. Rowling was already engaging in anti-trans rhetoric at the time, and some fans attempted to boycott the game. Despite that, it became the best-selling game of the year.

There’s a tendency for people who engage in online debates to overestimate how much of the general population knows or cares about what they’re discussing. A lot of these debates go down on places like X.com (née Twitter), which boasts over 500 million worldwide users. That’s a lot of people, but it’s worth remembering that around 80% of tweets are produced by around 10% of users, so the number of people actually engaging in debates about Harry Potter, or about anything, is relatively small compared to the general population, and the general population is who HBO is hoping to entertain with this show.

The Harry Potter plan

All aboard the long train to Hogwarts

HBO’s Harry Potter show will premiere this Christmas. The plan is to adapt all seven of Rowling’s books at a rate of one book per season over a period of around 10 years. That likely means we won’t get one season per year, but hopefully there won’t be too many long gaps.

The turnaround time could depend on how many people watch the first season. If there’s a huge audience, HBO will be more motivated to get a move on, and I suspect there will be a huge audience.

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Beyond the Wizarding World

I could be wrong. The Harry Potter show could debut and the world could collectively reject it, but I would be surprised. I think it more likely that a lot of fans will criticize the show throughout its run, which is fair, but that people will tune in en masse, unless the quality level is well below what we’re expecting.

Happily, if you have no interest in HBO’s Harry Potter show, there’re plenty of other things to watch, including a new rash of fantasy shows that include zero boy wizards between them.