As a girl who grew up watching the Harry Potter movies, I didn’t have much to critique back then. I just loved the wizarding world and wanted to escape our crazy one every time I opened the books or turned on my DVD player. Now, though, I’ve come to realize these movies have a lot of room for improvement.
And on the surface, the biggest issue is the characters.
With any fantasy movie, you’re time-limited, and you want to tell the basic story while keeping fans entertained and including the magic lore you want. But with books as vast as the Harry Potter novels, we miss many small details.
Now, the Harry Potter TV show is coming out, and there are many more reasons this series should be more character-based than the movies.
We have the time to devote to them
The biggest factor is time. These episodes will give us so much to work with. Probably even more so than the books.
As I mentioned before, one big reason the films couldn’t focus much on character development was the time constraint. While most Harry Potter movies ran about two to two and a half hours, that’s not nearly enough time to include all the storylines, plot points, little character moments, and more.
With these episodes releasing, we'll have more time than ever to truly dive into who these characters are. The episode lengths have been circulating, and they’re all nearly an hour long. While I’m sure that time will go to the main story and the core trio of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, you can use the extra time to dig deeper into character arcs and how they affect the story as a whole.
There are so many more new characters involved
Another reason we need to make the Harry Potter series more character-driven is the sheer number of characters involved. Yes, we have the typical ones that we would expect to see from the movies, like the trio, Draco, the professors, and all of that.
But this time, they cast other characters we didn’t even get to see in the films—like Peeves, who was very much missed when the movie came out. It would be a Harry Potter tragedy to add all these characters and not use them effectively.
For example, we never saw Charlie Weasley in the movies, and he was just cast (he'll be played by Harry Gilby). We know he will be a new character when his time comes. He’s a major part of the books later on, and I need to see his story done well.
We can look deeper into the lives of older adults
Something else that I believe will be done well if we lean more into character-driven stories is that we can dig deeper into the lives of the adults too. We don’t have to stay focused on the kids the whole time. And while I do love Hogwarts and the schooling and the magic, I also love the lore and the background that we never really get to experience before this.
It's been confirmed that Hannah Chinn and Jasper Talbot will play Lily and James in the new show. We can almost guarantee we’ll see more of the Marauders because we'll have more time. We’ll probably also see more of Snape’s story and how he became who he was. Heck, we might even get to see more of Dumbledore.
Either way, the world expands far beyond the students' years at Hogwarts, from ages 11 to 17. And I want to see them all.
Characters can become much more complex
The last reason is probably the most obvious: making this show character-driven would allow these characters to become much more complex and more equal to their novel counterparts.
With the films, the biggest issue is that we had the core trio, but because of time constraints, we didn’t really get their complexity. The same goes for many other characters. I still feel like the movies didn’t do Ginny correctly at all.
The same goes for the adults, and I don't think any of them have the deep complexity we see in the novels. Now, if we lean into their character arcs and their stories, we can really make them much more complex visually for a new audience to see. We can even add to the story if we really want to. Heck, there’s so much fanfiction out there about these characters because they lack depth, so now we might actually get that.
Either way, this series has the opportunity to make these characters shine. I only hope we actually get to witness it.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone premieres on HBO on Dec. 25, 2026.
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