Harry is back, but does the magic live?
Fans can expect an avalanche of movies, plays and books as series’ universe expands
The boy who lived will never die. His creator — and his production team — love him too terribly much.
After J.K. Rowling catapulted teen fiction into a new stratosphere with Harry Potter, the bestselling book series in history, she conquered Hollywood with an eight-movie film franchise that stands as the second-highest grossing ever.
When the end credits rolled on that final movie in 2011, to casual fans it seemed like Harry’s world had come to a natural conclusion: an epilogue sending the now 30-something characters on their wizarding ways.
But it was far from over. Sunday marked the latest chapter for Muggleland and its ballooning economy. Fans across the world were slipping into robes and painting lightning bolts on their foreheads to celebrate the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
Alison Nguyen, president of the Harry Potter Literature Club at the University of Minnesota, said she went numb at the close of Harry’s original adventures.
“I don’t know what to look forward to,” she thought at the time.
Now, she and millions of fans know: ahead lay an avalanche of new movies, plays and books.
While many fans are charmed to rejoin the Hogwarts gang, others worry that this expanding list of products could wreck their beloved universe. The new book is being promoted as the eighth in the series, yet it’s actually the script to the play that opened on the weekend in London.
Rowling, a powerful hands-on author, is raising her wand to light the road ahead, but is she actually just selling out? Casting a spell on fandom Rowling became the world’s first billionaire author, then dropped off that list after giving away a fortune to charity. Still, recent industry estimates put the franchise’s worth at $24 billion (U.S.).
So she’s not selling out, most fans say, she’s just selling.
“This play would never have happened if this particular team had never come to me,” Rowling said about Cursed Child on BBC Radio 2 last year. “I didn’t go looking for this; this found me.”
Even if Rowling never picked up another quill in her life, fans would continue building her empire, one time-extensive project at time.
There are more than 746,000 fancreated stories on fanfiction.net, besides Kickstarter-funded films detailing the back stories of characters, such as Severus Snape and the Marauders. Conventions rise up and “wizarding bands” wail in bookstores across the world.
The beauty of this particular fandom, said Lori Campbell, who teaches “Harry Potter: Blood, Power, Culture” at the University of Pittsburgh, is its lack of backlash. When something reaches peak popularity, such as Potter, people usually “turn against it and want to disown it or tear it down,” Campbell said in an email.
“I haven’t met anyone who used to be a fan.”
But whereas Lucas cashed out when he sold Star Wars to Disney, Campbell credited Rowling for keeping her work controlled and authentic, from ebook rights to merchandising. Fancy some fish and chips at Universal’s Hogwarts theme park? They come with tartar sauce and the author’s sign-off.
But some recent moves leave fans, including Kat Miller, creative and marketing director of fan site MuggleNet, feeling conflicted.
Rowling, for the first time, is publishing an ebook of the screenplay to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the first in a trilogy of films that will begin hitting theatres in November.
Whereas the children’s book The Tales of Beedle and the Bard and the original Fantastic Beasts textbooks expanded the universe, Miller said, the screenplay just capitalizes on fans’ wallets and excitement.
“That, to me, felt like a money move instead of a passion move, which is something we aren’t used to from Jo,” Miller said, Jo being how fans address Rowling.
Keith Hawk, managing editor of MuggleNet and a car salesman from Pennsylvania, expects a Potter TV series in the next 15 years. He welcomes new products — as long as no one pretends they are canon, or part of or in line with the original series. “The more you take things as canon, the less believable the fake world is,” he said.
He said he would support new Potter books taking place in an alternative time frame, but otherwise, “I would tell (Rowling) to her face, ‘No, that’s not canon. Don’t play with that.’ ”
Rowling, a powerful hands-on author, is raising her wand to light the road ahead, but is she actually just selling out?