'Harry Potter' books will be adapted into a decade-long TV series | Hacker News Reader

'Harry Potter' books will be adapted into a decade-long TV series

npr.org

42 pointsandsoitis34 comments

The movies got ridiculously lucky in casting the main three child stars, who all did a great job, avoided any scandals, and have turned out to be by all appearances happy, well adjusted adults. I think this was mostly from luck however, and trying to do the same thing with a larger cast, over 10 years, with increased scrutiny and social media just seems like a recipe for a disaster. The same thing for the adults, who are they going to find willing to take 10 years to be Snape, knowing that everyone is going to constantly compare them to the late great Alan Rickman?

Well, Daniel Radcliffe said he was an alcoholic and drank on the Harry Potter film set.

Tom Felton (Malfoy) wrote a book about his struggles after the series.

Also a lot of alcoholism too apparently.

Is there anyone in the UK who doesn't drink regularly?

Where I live almost every day after work some colleagues regularly grab a beer.

Me, I drink maybe 10 units of alcohol per YEAR on a rare occasion when I fancy a single malt.

My wife doesn't drink at all.

I don't drink. My partner doesn't drink. Nobody else in my family drinks. My partner's father ruined his life with alcohol and ended up on the street for almost twenty years.

The generation coming up also commonly doesn't drink.

No to mention his more recent commentary

Stranger Things seems to be doing fine.. I'm sure there are lots of other recent long running shows with kids in it that are doing fine too.

I doubt all those child start had perfect lives. I think they were lucky they didn't grow up in the toxic social media world where you had to be online 24/7. They wrapped up the last movie just before social media peaked.

Miley Cyrus and here TV series became popular in the same era , the transformation was drastic .

Emma Watson or Daniel Radcliffe no doubt didn’t have perfect lives as child stars but they have handled their stardom far better than their peers from the same time

Miley Cyrus said she intentionally turned herself incredibly cringe to be fired from her contract with Disney as they were making her miserable but her contract didn't allow her to leave so getting fired for not acting "child friendly" in public was her way out.

Could it be verified or corroborated by something else? It could also be she tried something new which backfired and few years later, her PR team made a half decent excuse to save face.

That logically sounds pretty unsound, any such termination clause would mean she gets very little or nothing.

The cost of this kind of exit is going to be always higher than any voluntary termination . Lawyers are not dumb this loophole would have pretty obvious early on, Disney has had decades of experience handling child stars she is hardly the first star or the first one to have problems with her image for Disney.

It just seems like a PR reason, it could perhaps explain until contract termination by Disney not the next ten years after the image she has built.

I grew up reading the books, but lost interest in the movies (or perhaps aged-out of them) after the fourth film. I'm excited by the possibility of telling the story in a way that allows them to breathe more.

It's not that I think the movies didn't serve the stories well, but I love the potential of long-form cinematic storytelling. That's much more my mode these days. I'm curious to see what changes in tone they choose to make, or rather, what they intend to do differently.

The 4th movie definitely didn't serve the story well. That movie is just bad.

IMO the Harry Potter movies suffered from: (1) switching directors between movies, causing tonal consistency problems (2) trying to compress long novels into a 2 hour runtime. The first 3 books are _just_ short enough that this could possibly work, but books 4-7 are just not going to fit. They got this split right-ish by splitting book 7, but books 4,5, and 6 suffered for it. (3) The director of the 4th movie _didn't read the book_. What a call! Imagine if Peter Jackson hadn't read Lord of the Rings but just went for it.

I broadly agree, but the third film is genuinely excellent and while consistent direction might have aided the franchise as a whole, it would have robbed us of the best film.

Really wish they were tackling literally anything else in the world of HP. We have the movies, we have the books. We know need a TV show rehashing the same things?

It just screams laziness and as a fan of the HP world it's a disappointment to not get to learn anything else about the Wizarding World.

Agreed, I think that the Star Wars miniseries are in many ways better than the original movies. I would love to watch a season of Hagrid's backstory

I'm pleasantly surprised that J.K Rowling will have creative control over this. Hopefully this won't be as bad as the Ring of Power series.

Looking at how the Fantastic Beasts series turned out, I'm not sure if her involvement is actually a positive.

I was referring to the over-the-top woke stuff that made it hard to believe at times. But yeah it's no guarantee. Ideally she shouldn't have control, just veto power.

RoP wasn't bad because of any woke stuff. It was bad because it was bad.

It's entirely possible to be "woke" in some sense and be superb. Last of Us S1E3 being one example.

Have you forgotten that she does screenwriting for Fantastic Beasts? Nothing to be excited about.

"Max's commitment to preserving the integrity of my books is important to me, and I'm looking forward to being part of this new adaptation which will allow for a degree of depth and detail only afforded by a long form television series," Rowling said in the press release announcing the show.

Oh, dang. The screenwriting she's done for fantastic beasts is not on par with her novel writing.

If she's something like a show runner here with hands on each script, it would make the series suffer. Some people are great at story tellingin one medium but that doesn't always translate.

Honestly, she just hit the lottery with a reasonably good story at a pivotal time. The late 90s to the late 2000s was the one period in human history with maximum teenage readership. Paper books were still in vogue, bookshops were still a thing not being swallowed by Amazon, a lot of cheap paperbacks and copies were appearing in the emerging market countries, reading was significantly encouraged at schools, with many places stocking Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, Goosebumps and the likes in an effort to encourage teen readership. Also, no mobile devices!

I doubt we'll ever get a period like that ever again. Those 2 or 3 decades were the peak for writers. Almost every prolific writer of that time with a reasonably good (not great) hand at writing could mint money. It's no surprise that some of the biggest hit authors of that time were Rowling (catering to the teen market in general, with a fantasy theme that easily mirrors school - unlike LOTR), Danielle Steele (catering to the female teen market) and Tom Clancy (catering to the male teen market).

I assumed that statement meant she would be involved similarly to how she was with the movies, when she didn't do any screenwriting AFAICT (because the movies were faithful adaptations of the books, so there wasn't much to write).

It seems like the TV series will also be an adaptation of the books, which means there won't be any need for new stories like there was with Fantastic Beasts.

I guess it will be just like the movies, but without the need to cut much from the story. Sounds pretty cool tbh.

This seems like a good opportunity to ask if there are any other Wizard People enjoyers here

“The ugliest boy in the world has the ball, and he’s got a mouth full of driftwood he’s calling teeth.”

Exciting! The movies had a specific interpretation which felt inaccurate at a lot of points, so I'd love to see another go.

HARRY! DID YOU PUT YOUR NAME IN THE GOBLET OF FIRE? asked Dumbledore calmly.

Harry pocketed it.

a decade long, good grief.

This would be very much welcome. Watching this in adulthood while I read the book when I was not!

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