Warner Bros. wanted to make Harry Potter and the Cursed Child movies

It’s been over a decade since Warner Bros. released their last Harry Potter movie, and while much may have changed in those years, the studio’s thirst to capitalize on the wizarding franchise has not waned. Warner Bros. is now Warner Media Discovery, and Harry Potter has retired from the big screen and been replaced by magizoologist Newt Scamander in the Fantastic Beasts prequel movies.

That said, Harry is keeping busy. He grew up and appeared in the stage show Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which is about Harry and Ginny Weasley’s children (that will never not be weird to type) attending Hogwarts alongside the kid of Harry’s former rival Draco Malfoy. When that play hit the stage, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling published the script as a book that was touted as the next entry in the franchise. I still have flashbacks to the literal hundreds of disappointed people I talked to back when I worked at a bookstore during Cursed Child’s release who were confused to discover the thing marketed as the eighth Harry Potter book was in fact the script for a play. But I digress.

Considering how much Warner Bros. Discovery wants to expand the Potterverse, wouldn’t it make sense to do an adaptation of The Cursed Child? After all, it does still include a fair few of the main characters from the original series, even if they largely take a back seat to the next generation.

Warner Bros. wanted to make movies out of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

As it turns out, we’re not the first people to ask that question. A new report from Puck has it that Warner Bros. did indeed ponder this very thing after Harry Potter and the Cursed Child hit stages in 2016. The studio reportedly wanted to make two movies out of The Cursed Child, but Rowling and her representatives (along with stage producers Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender) weren’t interested. Their thinking was that releasing a Cursed Child movie could impact the play’s run on the stage. Plays have a much longer life cycle than movies or shows, and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is still in the middle of it even six years on. As of this writing, The Cursed Child has opened in five territories, but still hasn’t been produced by a touring company or opened on cruise ships, for example. There’s more to be milked out of that play yet.

Plus, there were still some executives at Warner Bros. who weren’t excited about the prospect of making movies out of The Cursed Child, since it would have essentially amounted to admitting that the Fantastic Beasts series was destined to fail. And now that we’re three movies into that series, it does look like that’s what’s happened, with each new Fantastic Beasts movie making way less money than the last.

As for whether Warner Bros. Discovery might now be able to now convince Rowling and company to approve a Cursed Child movie, it’s complicated. Beyond questions about rights, we don’t know if original Harry Potter stars like Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson would even be willing to return. Rowling has caught a lot of flak for her anti-trans rhetoric these past few years, enough that some of the movies’ cast have spoken out against the damage it’s doing, Radcliffe included. The question of whether Warner Bros. could get the band back together is a valid one.

Still, don’t bet on Hogwarts going away anytime soon. There’s more Harry Potter content coming, whether or not a Cursed Child movie ever materializes.

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h/t ComicBook.com