With Fantastic Beasts Out of the Picture, Chances Are a Cursed Child Movie Will Actually Happen
As we have covered just recently, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and its sequel movies were not a very successful Harry Potter spin-off. And most likely this spin-off is done and gone now. Consequently, at the moment Warner Bros. has no more Harry Potter movies in development.
Yet David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery clearly wishes to remedy this situation.
"We're going to have a real focus on franchises. We haven't had a 'Superman ' movie in 13 years. We haven't done a 'Harry Potter ' movie in 15 years. The DC movies and the 'Harry Potter' movies provided a lot of the profits of Warner Bros. Motion Pictures over the last 25 years. So a focus on the franchise — one of the big advantages that we have," he said (via).
The Fantastic Beasts film series apparently doesn't count as Harry Potter for Zaslav - another nail in the coffin. But if not Fantastic Beasts, what Harry Potter content could he be thinking of?
The most likely option is a film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a play written by Jack Thorne, based on a story by J.K. Rowling.
It's a sequel set 19 years after the events of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and it focuses on Harry's son, Albus Severus Potter, during his time at Hogwarts, where he gets into trouble after messing with a Time-Turner. Harry, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy also play their parts, but now that they are adults, they are more of a supporting cast this time. The Cursed Child is the closest thing we have to a proper continuation of the Harry Potter saga.
The only problem is that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is not very good.
Its story has been heavily criticised, and even compared to fanfiction, because it recycles plots, breaks established canon from time to time, and generally just doesn't feel like part of the Harry Potter universe.
J.K. Rowling's involvement did not help, as being a good book writer does not mean being a good screenwriter.
The Cursed Child will need considerable editing and rewriting to become a worthy continuation of the stories of our beloved wizarding characters. Whether Warner Bros. understand this and have the talent required for such rewrites is another question.