Max's 'Harry Potter' TV Show May Prove No More Popular Than Amazon's 'Rings of Power'
Curiosity will drive initial viewership, but will general audiences care about seeing a new television version of a movie franchise they mostly loved the first time?
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav did not triumphantly declare that Coyote Vs. Acme would be ritualistically deleted for tax rebates, and I’m not sure why anyone expected any such grand announcement. As a rule for quarterly earnings calls, you don’t go out of your way to bring up circumstances that put your company in a negative light and/or will dominate the media discourse. The key talking point was that WBD had managed to make a profit in their direct-to-consumer divisions, even as the overall news was mixed, and the stock dropped 13% this morning to $8.29 per share. That was close to the 52-week low of $8.25 before rebounding to $8.57. Among the flashiest announcements were assurances that the promised Harry Potter episodic would premiere on Max sometime in 2026. That’s good news for the streaming platform and the overall studio unless you’re not sure whether anyone’s going to give a damn about a Harry Potter TV show.
The Rings of Power flamed out quickly.
No, this isn’t about whatever impact J.K. Rowling’s involvement will have on the show. The controversial (and allegedly anti-Semitic) Hogwarts Legacy video game sold 12 million units in the first two weeks and had sold, as of last December, 24 million copies. Rowling has taken heat in the online world for transphobic declarations. And, yes, the ill-advised Fantastic Beasts theatrical prequel series flamed out after the third of five planned films. It earned $1.89 billion globally on a combined $580 million budget. That would have been decent, but $814 million came from the first (well-reviewed and mostly well-received) 2016 installment, while just $395 million came from the rejected “part three” in 2022. With Secrets of Dumbledore serving as a soft finale, the series became the go-to example of betting on abstract IP over specific elements or characters. However, the Harry Potter books and films have remained popular. But what does this TV show have to offer?
Only 37% of domestic and 45% of international Prime Video subscribers who started The Lord of The Rings: The Ring of Power finished the first season. That’s a miserable stat for a $465 million-budgeted television season and a sign that (like many streaming originals) the second season will obtain much lower overall numbers and (if it exists) the third season will dwindle further. There is an enormous difference between hype-driven viewership for the first season and viewers giving a damn by the time season three or four rolled around. It was a classic misunderstanding of viewer interest. Audiences liked the Lord of the Rings films in their specificity (Peter Jackson’s direction, the performances of Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen and Ian McKellen) and the then-unprecedented level of big-budget fantasy spectacle. They didn’t care about a Middle Earth-set prequel series with unknown performers amid a sea of “next Game of Thrones” contenders in the abstract.
The Harry Potter series was popular because audiences liked the Harry Potter movies.
This presumed Harry Potter show will adapt J.K. Rowling’s original seven novels, with familiar narratives and a slew of well-liked marquee characters. However, then and now, the popularity of the Harry Potter movies was due to the source material, the unprecedentedly big kid-friendly wizard spectacle (The Sorcerer’s Stone and The Fellowship of the Ring opened a month apart in late 2001), and the popularity of the movies themselves. Audiences enjoyed the production values, John Williams’ themes and performances from the likes of Emma Watson and Robbie Coltrane. As Paramount has slowly realized, much of the global Transformers fandom in the late 2000s and early 2010s was based around the Michael Bay-directed epics, which offered a then-unmatched level of present-tense spectacle alongside unique vulgar auteurism. I’d argue the “popularity” of Superman was as much about the quality of Richard Donner’s groundbreaking and spectacular post-Watergate superhero fantasy as interest in the Man of Steel in the abstract.
All four franchises arrived in theaters when spectacle and mythology-driven fantasy filmmaking on that size and scale was (mostly) unprecedented and thus unique unto itself. Even the Transformers films were massive in scope compared with the smaller-scale Phase One MCU movies. But when The Rings of Power dropped in October of 2022, it was just another big-budget fantasy show alongside Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, The Wheel of Time and Shadow and Bone, all trying to be the “next Game of Thrones.” Recall in the 2000s the slew of “next Harry Potter” or “next Lord of the Rings” YA franchises that stalled after one or two chapters. If Rings if Power doesn’t last, it’ll ironically be a modern-day equivalent of The Dark Is Rising, The Spiderwick Chronicles, or those first two Percy Jackson movies. But wait, isn’t the new Percy Jackson show, having just been renewed for season two on Disney+, a success?
Hollywood got it right the first time.
Well, that’s just one example of a redemption narrative at play whereby the more source-faithful television show gives the fans what they wanted the first time after a botched film version. The basic cable Shadowhunters series had a rather passionate fandom amid its three seasons, partially because it felt like far more of what fans of The Mortal Instruments novels wanted but didn’t get from the 2013 movie The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. Mixed reviews notwithstanding, would Netflix’s big-budget episodic live-action adaptation Avatar: The Last Airbender have been nearly as big of a deal had the M. Night Shyamalan-directed theatrical feature been so soundly rejected a decade prior? Likewise, Deadpool broke out partially because it was sold as Ryan Reynolds getting to do Wade Wilson right after X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The Force Awakens was sold as a corrective measure after the mixed consumer reception (at least online) of George Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy.
Those eight Harry Potter films released from November 2001 to July 2011 earned Rotten Tomato critic scores ranging from 96% for Deathly Hallows Part II to 77% for Deathly Hallows Part I. Not even accounting for inflation, overseas expansion and the 3-D and Imax boosts that didn’t come into play until the final sequels, they had earned $7.86 billion worldwide on a combined $1.155 billion production budget. Not only is that a considerable amount of money, but that’s a stunning consistency in movie-to-movie earnings (especially for the second film through the seventh chapter). Regardless of your personal rankings (7 > 5 > 8 > 4 > 3 > 1 > 6 > 2), no one aside from diehard fans of the novels who mourned every omitted subplot or changed story beat would argue that A) the books weren’t done justice or B) the movies weren’t pretty darn good in their own right.
A curiosity at first, but what then?
This is not a Broadway adaptation of a movie (or vice versa) or a three-film adaptation of a book. The show will likely spend a season adapting each novel, offering new or unknown actors playing characters who have already been embedded in the minds of moviegoers as the likes of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Alan Rickman and the like. Since those movies weren’t “Egad, Hollywood ruined my favorite books!” disasters the first time out, there won’t be any artistically essential or redemptive reason for a new adaptation. This will be less like another go at Percy Jackson and more like a TV adaptation of the original Lord of the Rings trilogy. Hollywood got it right the first time. This series has no reason to exist beyond a need for media-friendly streaming content amid a new normal where IPs must be eternally milked like they are eternally available food items. But even McDonalds doesn’t sell the McRib all-year round.
It’s possible that the popularity of and familiarity with the series will gain at least some consistency as audiences tune in and out depending on which novel is on tap. It doesn’t help that The Chamber of Secrets (book two) is no one’s favorite Harry Potter book. We’ll see if the show’s budget and expectations can hold out until season four when The Goblet of Fire, often considered the best of the bunch, gets its long-form spotlight. Moreover, to the extent that audiences flocked to the Harry Potter movies in the 2000s precisely because they liked the Harry Potter movies, we don’t know how audiences will treat a new slow-walking adaptation of the same material with the same characters. I imagine plenty will be curious about the first season of this new Harry Potter show. But it remains to be seen whether more than 37% will care about the second or third seasons.