‘Harry Potter’ director Chris Columbus gives support to upcoming HBO TV remake

Posted On January 21, 2025January 21, 2025

Harry Potter director Chris Columbus has expressed his support for HBO’s upcoming reboot, saying it’s a “spectacular idea” that will benefit from the narrative flexibility that comes with television formats.

The new series is set to arrive in 2026, with shooting said to be starting in the summer of this year. According to HBO CEO, Casey Bloys, the new series will chronicle “each of the iconic books” in a “faithful adaptation.”

Columbus helmed the first two movie instalments, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and recently praised the upcoming adaptation in a recent interview, saying its format will immediately enable it to venture into storytelling territory that he felt restricted by with the big screen.

“There’s a certain restriction when you’re making a film,” the director told People. “Our film was two hours and 40 minutes, and the second one was almost as long,” he said, adding that he tried to “get as much of the book in as possible.”

As Bloys also claimed, the series will span “10 consecutive years,” and they will be able to explore aspects of the books Columbus and his team couldn’t, appeasing fans who felt the movies lacked in places with source text loyalty. “The fact that they have the leisure of [multiple] episodes for each book, I think that’s fantastic,” Columbus said.

The director concluded: “You can get all the stuff in the series that we didn’t have an opportunity to do, all these great scenes that we just couldn’t put in the films. I look forward to seeing what they’re trying to do with it. I think it’s great.”

Francesca Gardiner will helm the project with costume designer Holly Waddington, who more recently won an Oscar for her work on Poor Things. While casting for the main trio has yet to be confirmed, Billboard reported that over 32,000 children have auditioned, making it one of the most coveted projects of recent times.

Since the final movie was released in 2011, fan appetite for the series has remained high despite the ongoing controversy surrounding its original writer, J.K. Rowling. Still, with fan communities thriving in the years that followed and the arrival of other projects like the stage version of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, there’s no doubt that the HBO reboot will attract significant viewership.

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