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A Good Hollywood Remake
I really don’t like how many remakes and sequels there are in Hollywood movies and TV. There are lots of scripts out there that are new and original and exciting. But making remakes, sequels, and action movies with recognizable faces but below average plots is safe and will make the industry money.
Sometimes, however rarely (IT), these movies can be good and generate interest and good reviews. But more often than not, they don’t (Jumanji). These original ideas should be the majority of what gets made and seen. Possibilities for stories are literally endless, so why should we keep telling the same ones?
With all that said, here’s my idea for a remake that should, but definitely won’t happen: a Harry Potter TV show.
Hear me out.
Last week, I wrote about the Lord of the Rings TV series that is in the early stages of development at Amazon. That series appears to be Amazon’s response to Game of Thrones, in that they want to make their own high budget fantasy show now that GoT is ending soon. Now while that could very well be a bad idea, I think a Harry Potter show could be a better bad idea.
Yes, I know the Potter movies are the third highest grossing film franchise of all time. I know that the three main actors are some of the most recognizable faces on the planet. And I know that Harry Potter is one of the most influential and widely loved book and movie series out there.
But while all of these movies are on the good-great spectrum (they all have at least a 7.4 on IMDb), one thing they lack is some of the true detail from the books. This is the case for any book that is adapted into a movie, but there is so much cool stuff left out.
As a big fan of the HP books, I would like to see all of those things portrayed on a screen. The movies were able to make all the action and set pieces look awesome. But that was sometimes at the expense of character development or developing backstory.
The two biggest examples of this come in the last two books. In The Half-Blood Prince, we get to learn a ton about Voldemort’s backstory and how the nice and charming Tom Riddle became the most evil wizard ever who killed a countless number of people and other creatures. In the book, we find out about his grandparents and his parents, some of his life before Hogwarts, and what he was like while he was at Hogwarts. It’s all super interesting stuff. But it’s largely glossed over in the movie.
The other example is from The Deathly Hallows. In this book, we learn basically all of Dumbledore’s backstory that has been hidden from us for the first six books. We learn about his relationship with his family, how his sister died, why Harry never knew about his brother, his friendship (and possibly more) with Grindelwald, and a lot more. But in The Deathly Hallows movie – which was actually split into two movies – you see a quick conversation between Harry and Elphias Doge, Harry, Ron, and Hermione talking to Aberforth, and a bunch of references to the fact that Dumbledore didn’t help them enough in their Horcrux search. That’s about it.
Things like this could be explored much more deeply in a television series. A chapter or two could be an hour-long episode almost exactly adapted from the books, and each book could be a season. Being the fan of the books that I am, I would love to see all the extra stuff and how it would look and feel to experience it onscreen.
Now I started off this post by saying this definitely wouldn’t happen. And there’s a 99% chance it won’t. Harry Potter is a cultural phenomenon. The three main stars (Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint) are who they are professionally because of it. No matter what movies they do or whatever else they achieve in their personal lives, they will always be known as Harry, Ron, and Hermione. On top of that, the last movie came out less than seven years ago. It’s still way too soon. But I can see a remake of Harry Potter happening at some point in the future. It’s just the way that movies work these days. But when it inevitably is remade, it should be as a TV show.