David Zaslav Wants to Bring Back Harry Potter
And by that, I mean the character of Harry Potter himself, which his fans will love.
This includes working with JK Rowling if possible, which his Stans will hate.
But let’s keep in mind, Jo Rowling hasn’t changed any of her stripes. She is a TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist). Don’t forget the Radical Feminist part of that. She is the one that went back and declared Dumbledore gay, despite the fact that this adds a greasy feeling to Harry and Dumbledore’s very close relationship. When Cursed Child was produced on the stage, she was the one that said it was totally cool to race-swap Hermione, despite having described her as white and deeply pale, and that she “looked like a panda” when she had a black eye.
When they were still speaking, Rowling had an interview with Emily Watson, where JK said if she could do it, she would go back and make Hermione, Harry’s love interest. This was the first strong indication I had that sometime around the third book, the Potterverse became something of a group effort.
I mean ask yourself, what was Harry’s biggest need? What did he want the most in the world?
Answer: A family. Which Ginny Weasley provided, and Ginny’s huge family loved him almost as one of their own from nearly the start. Hermione Granger absolutely did NOT bring any kind of family to the party. She was effectively an orphan herself by the end of the story.
This strongly hints to me that Rowling got talked into making the right decision but deeply regrets it because Hermione is clearly and obviously Rowling’s Mary Sue. And she wanted her to end up with the high-status boy. Let me stress that I have absolutely no proof of this whatsoever, this is my own opinion but from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on out, it doesn’t feel like it was written by the same author as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
The Fantastic Beasts trilogy was lousy, but I can’t say it didn’t make money. That said, it didn’t make anywhere near the kind of money Warner had wanted or expected.
Combined Budget: $580,000,000.
Combined USA Box Office: $489,444,320.
Combined Global Box Office: $1,864,739,869.
Harry Potter’s combined global take was 7.7 billion and that doesn’t factor in inflation or theater price hikes.
Hopefully, this revival doesn’t involve a screen adaptation of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. It was a terrible play in every way available to it.
I suspect she authored this one solo due to the fundamental mistakes that were made. Some of which indicate unfamiliarity with her own damn books!
There is a scene in the play where Harry’s son, Albus (so damn creepy now) who suffers from an inferiority complex due to being the son of a great man, travels back in time and watches while the whole school cheers as Harry’s name pops out of the Goblet of Fire.
Did anybody else just go “huh?”
The whole school was pissed at him and thought he cheated because he was a glory hound. Everyone but his two closest friends turned on him. And the ridiculous part is, it would have been a great little scene for Albus. He would have realized that, wow, my legendary father had it pretty rough when he was a kid.
The more fundamental problem with the Cursed Child is that it was a science fiction time travel story. Forgive me for stating the obvious but Harry Potter stories were ALWAYS toff school mysteries. A huge chunk of Rowling’s success was in reviving a formula that had been moribund for a couple of generations.
An English kid goes to a boarding school, the kid is either poor, an orphan, or a poor little rich boy. Whatever he is, his newly acquired best friend will be the opposite, each finding something he needs in the other. They will have a mutual friend who is a swot (a smart kid with bad social skills). The school will be centuries old and rumored to be haunted. Secret rooms and passages are a must. Mandatory supporting characters: The School Bully and his enforcers. The Cruel Teacher, and the Kindly Headmaster. The books would frequently feature words in the title like Name Here and the Mystery/Secret/Enigma/Puzzle/Riddle/Hidden/Dilemma of the Noun. Murders were a little rare although there undoubtedly was at least one in the school’s past. If it was in the present, the kindly groundskeeper or headmaster has been wrongly arrested for it and the kids have to find the real culprit.
Having a mixed boys and girls team was new because, in classic toff school mysteries, schools were always segregated by sex.
The Catcher in the Rye basically killed the whole genre, and why the fuck does anybody think the Catcher in the Rye is any good? Because it’s NOT.
Regardless, Rowling wrote a kid’s book that revived a genre that was pretty much extinct but as it turned out, still had huge appeal, she set it in a child friendly, 1990s urban fantasy environment. Good for her as far as that goes, whether or not she had a team helping her later is irrelevant to the fact she came up with the original idea.
I’ll grant that her business sense is impeccable. When it became obvious just how ballistic her rise was, she immediately started hiring people. But I feel it should be noted, that has never produced anything like the last four books in the Harry Potter series.
That doesn’t change the fact that she went back and made major retcons to her own canon and wanted to make more for no better reason than the Stan portion of her fanbase wanted her to do it. Cheered deafeningly for her when she did it. And then turned on her like a school of piranha when she couldn’t keep up with the latest fashions in reality.
Regardless, if David Zaslav has reason to believe that J.K. Rowling has another Harry Potter-like success inside her just waiting to burst forth who am I to say she doesn’t? I certainly don’t have anything like her stratospheric levels of success.
Good luck Jo.
You’ll need it.
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