Warner Bros. Desires to Make Extra ‘Harry Potter’ Motion pictures

You don’t want me to let you know that the phrase that drives all of Hollywood films today isn’t even a phrase. It’s two letters: IP. No franchise is ever really lifeless as long as there may be extra money to be constructed from it.

For instance, the Harry Potter story was all the time meant as a finite one, which concluded in each J.Okay. Rowling’s novels and the film variations with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The wizarding world has been expanded in numerous methods since then, just like the Improbable Beasts and The place to Discover Them films and the Harry Potter stage play, however Rowling hasn’t written a brand new Harry Potter novel in effectively over a decade.

However that isn’t stopping Warner Bros., the studio that produced the Harry Potter franchise, from in search of methods to start out it again up once more. Throughout a name with buyers this week, the pinnacle of Warner Bros. Discovery, David Zaslav, stated that his firm‘s focus is “franchises” — together with, doubtlessly, Harry Potter. As he put it:

We haven’t had a Superman film in 13 years. We haven’t performed a Harry Potter in 15 years. The DC films and the Harry Potter films offered numerous the income for Warner Bros…over the previous 25 years.

Zaslav’s numbers aren’t fairly proper. The final solo Superman film, Man of Metal, got here out 9 years in the past. And the ultimate Harry Potter movie was in 2011. (Courting the sequence finish to “15 years” in the past additionally, fairly curiously, ignores the truth that since then the corporate has launched three Potter prequels within the type of the Improbable Beasts sequence. That in all probability tells you a large number about how effectively these films have performed for the corporate.) Zaslav stated WBD may be very intent on making new movies “if we will do one thing with J.Okay. on Harry Potter going ahead.”

That might appear to be a not insignificant if, since Rowling has to date resisted the stress to write down a brand new Harry Potter novel (and continues to make huge quantities of cash from the merchandising and licensing of those she already did write). The ball — or I assume the Golden Snitch on this case — is in her court docket.