More than a decade after the final film in the series was published, a TV version of the best-selling Harry Potter books is said to be in the works and approaching completion.
There are also rumoured efforts to bring the books’ creator JK Rowling on board as a producer, though no agreement has been reached.
The Philosopher’s Stone, the first Harry Potter novel, was published in 1997 and soon became a global phenomenon.
The series consists of seven installments, culminating with Deathly Hallows, with the first of eight features starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint debuting in 2001.
Bloomberg claims that HBO, which is owned by Warner Bros Discovery, is nearing an agreement to develop a TV series based on the story of the boy wizard, who escapes what should have been a fatal assault by the world’s most dreaded wizard when he’s just an infant.
According to the newspaper, the story comes from “a person with knowledge of the matter,” with each season of the programme allegedly based on a different novel.
David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, and HBO president Casey Bloys are said to have tried to convince Rowling to join the series as a producer.
According to the source, Rowling will not be engaged in the televised version as the primary author, nor will she be in charge of the day-to-day operations of the production, but she will ensure that the programme’remains loyal’ to the original source material if an agreement is reached.
The publication said that a spokesperson for Warner Bros declined to comment, as the film and entertainment studio gears up to announce a new streaming strategy in the coming days.
Rowling said earlier this year that she didn’t worry about ‘ruining’ her reputation because of her views on the trans community and gender problems, despite having sparked controversy and been accused of being transphobic in the past, which she has disputed.
In 2020, the 57-year-old questioned why a story referred to “people who menstruate” instead of “women.”
Following accusations of transphobia, as cisgender women aren’t the only ones who can menstruate, several members of the Harry Potter ensemble have since spoken out in support of the trans community in response to Rowling’s remarks over the years.
‘I never set out to hurt anyone,’ she said in a recent edition of The Witch Trials of JK Rowling podcast. ‘However, I was not afraid of stepping down from my pinnacle.’
‘And what has interested me in the last 10 years and definitely in the last few years, especially on social media “You’ve ruined your legacy, oh you could have been beloved forever but you chose to say this,” the writer added, and I believe you could not have misunderstood me more deeply.
‘I don’t stroll around my home thinking about my legacy; what a pretentious way to spend your life, thinking about what your memory will be. Whatever. I’ll be gone. I’m concerned with the present. I’m concerned about the living.’
She subsequently admitted that she “absolutely knew” her remarks about the transsexual community would make Harry Potter devotees “deeply unhappy.”
‘I’m constantly told that I have betrayed my own books, but my position is that I’m absolutely upholding the positions that I took in Potter,’ she said.
‘My position is that this activist movement in the form that it’s currently taking, echoes the very thing that I was warning against in Harry Potter.’
