Failing to read the room, the ‘Harry Potter’ reboot already facing backlash and boycotts will bow at the altar of J.K. Rowling’s writing

At the apex of its popularity, fans of the source material were well within their rights to blast the Harry Potter movies for daring to leave out huge amounts of important and popular elements from the novels.

These days, though, and the franchise is nowhere near the cultural behemoth it once was, and a lot of it has to do with J.K. Rowling doing fine job of torpedoing her reputation by repeatedly espousing personal views that could at best be described as not particularly progressive.

New Harry Potter content used to be an event, but Warner Bros. being greeted with a collective boo from all corners when it announced the episodic reboot nobody asked for, wanted, or needed underlines just how far both Rowling and the Wizarding World’s stock has fallen, and we haven’t even mentioned the overwhelming apathy to have plagued the presumably dead Fantastic Beasts spin-off series.

And yet, producer David Heyman revealed to Total Film that the current plan for the show is to lean even more heavily into Rowling’s prose, in turn making her input a lot more pronounced than it was the first time around.

“It’s early days. We haven’t even hired a writer to begin writing. It’s a bit early. Hopefully [it will be] something that’s very special. [It] gives us an opportunity to see the books, and to enjoy a series which explores the books more deeply.”

Not exactly the news everybody was demanding, because more Rowling is hardly going to quell the discontent, but at least we’re a long way away from having to deal with the first season following The Boy Who Rebooted.