What’s in the box, Harry?! The beloved Harry Potter film franchise could’ve taken a much darker turn if director David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club) had gotten his hands on it. In an interview promoting the upcoming 4K re-release of Se7en, the filmmaker told Variety that Warner Bros. once asked to speak with him about potentially adapting J.K. Rowling's book series about a young wizard for the big screen.
“I was asked to come in and talk to them about how I would do Harry Potter,” Fincher remembered. “I remember saying, ‘I just don’t want to do the clean Hollywood version of it. I want to do something that looks a lot more like Withnail and I, and I want it to be kind of creepy.”
Needless to say, the studio wanted to take a different, more family-friendly creative direction. “They were like, ‘We want Thom Browne schooldays by way of Oliver,’” Fincher said.
In the end, Home Alone director Chris Columbus directed the first two Harry Potter installments before Alfonso Cuarón took the series in a darker, more mature direction with the third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco, Mona Lisa Smile) grabbed the reigns for the fourth film, Goblet of Fire, and then passed them to David Yates, who directed the last four movies in the series as well as the Fantastic Beasts spinoff films. Arguably, Fincher's take on the material might've jived with the more sinister tone of the final few films in the series, but at that point, Yates had been firmly established himself as the franchise's go-to guy
After his vision of Harry and Hogwarts didn't quite jive with the studio's, Fincher went on to make Panic Room, the 2002 thriller that starred Jodie Foster, Jared Leto, and a young Kristen Stewart. Currently, Fincher is reportedly developing an English-language Squid Game remake for Netflix. He was also working on a Chinatown prequel mini-series with Robert Towne prior to the legendary screenwriter's death in July 2024.
Meanwhile, a Harry Potter reboot series in the works at HBO/Max. Filming is scheduled to begin at some point this year, with a likely 2026 or 2027 premiere.
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