Warner Bros. has started taking pitches for the already-announced Harry Potter TV series. The plan is to adapt all seven books into a sequence of television seasons for Max and HBO. David Zaslav has already said it will be a ten-year project, so anyone pitching has to commit.
The series adaption plans were first announced back in April last year. According to a report in Deadline, the pitches began in Los Angeles this week and multiple writers are already in the mix. The writers have been commissioned by Max to create their pitches and have to illustrate their own takes on the IP.
There will then be a second round in the UK. JK Rowling retains a significant amount of control, famously rejecting Spielberg from making the movies because he wanted to relocate the story to the USA, and also declining an animated adaption of her books in favor of the live-action movies.
Hopefully, she will be on her guard against the potential horrors of the current crop of Hollywood writers and their “current year” thinking. The first book was published in 1997, and the first movie was in 2001. This was just before the Western world collapsed into insanity.
Martha Hillier (The Last Kingdom), Kathleen Jordan (Teenage Bounty Hunters), Tom Moran (The Devil’s Hour), and Michael Lesslie (The Little Drummer Girl) are among the names in the mix, according to the report. At least we know with JK Rowling that clumsily inserted trans-characters are unlikely, but just about everything else from single-direction race-swapping, gender-blind casting, and overt, non-story progressing character sexuality will probably be on the cards.
Normally the chance to see some beloved books adapted in longer form, letting some of the author’s more interesting ideas breathe, would be exciting. But this is Hollywood.
Max is open to the possibility of developing more than one idea based on the Harry Potter franchise, and Hollywood always says if one is good, seven must be better!
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