It’s hard to overstate just how much WB has riding on its upcoming Harry Potter TV series, a reboot of the films with a fully new cast. It’s an enormous undertaking, one that fans aren’t sure should even be happening, but with the lingering popularity of the franchise (a Harry Potter video game, Hogwarts Legacy, recently was the best-selling of the year and has now moved 34+ million copies), the show is going to be widely-watched.
The timeline here is…wild. On a recent WB earnings call, David Zaslav said that the plan is for the currently seven season HBO Harry Potter series to run for a decade. That would mean after its planned 2027 premiere, it would end in 2037.
But that’s on par with the movies, right? Yes. The movies ran from November 2001 with The Sorcerer’s Stone to The Deathly Hallows Part 2 on July 2011. Almost a decade exactly.
You can see the difference, however. Those were 2-3 hour movies. The plan for at least Harry Potter season 1, which will cover the first book, is a full eight episodes, 3-4x as long. And presumably each season will be the same.
And I mean, have you watched streaming shows? Ten years divided by seven seasons of a show would be 1 year, 5 months between seasons of a show. That is a tight schedule in this age of streaming, and there are other factors to consider here. Shows that are able to hit shorter deadlines are lower budget ones like The Bear or Always Murders in the Building. A Harry Potter series is going to be a sprawling blockbuster of a project. The idea that it can get a full eight episode season out every year and five months seems absurd. Shows like this are much closer to two years between seasons.
Past that, if you’ve watched the movies or read the books, you know that things get very, very long by the end, with later stories easily double the length of something like Sorcerer’s Stone. While possible, it’s easy to imagine that later seasons might have to be longer or split into different parts.
I don’t see any way that a Harry Potter TV series averages any less than two years between its huge seasons. If that’s true, seven seasons of a Harry Potter TV show starting in 2027 would not end until 2041. I genuinely think even that’s ambitious.
WB seems to be committing to this to the long haul no matter what. It reminds me of what happened with Amazon and its Lord of the Rings series, Rings of Power, where it said up front it was going to make five seasons. However, season 2 viewership cratered and was half of season 1, so even renewing it for season 3 took many months. And the gap between the release of season 1 and season 2. Just under two years…
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.