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“Are you really Harry Potter?” wee little Dominic McLaughlin is asked by another incredulous first-year Hogwarts student at the end of the Harry Potter teaser from five months ago. That intriguing bit of marketing really leaned into elements from J.K. Rowling’s book series glossed over 25 years ago in the Christopher Columbus movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, such as just how miserable muggle school is for the Boy Who Lived. But by focusing so much on what is essentially the prologue, we didn’t get much flavor of what the real series is going to be about.
That show is thus on much better display in the full trailer for the first season of HBO’s Harry Potter reboot, aptly titled for at least this year as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Whereas the secrets of Headmaster Dumbledore’s school for witchcraft and wizardry was only teased in the previous marketing, its total breadth is now on display. There is the sorting hat brought out beneath the floating candles of the great hall where Harry, Hermione Granger (Arabella Stanton), and all the rest have their fates decided; the botanical gardens are setting down roots; and a wizard’s idea of chess makes its move.
Some of it even looks a bit different than how we might remember it based on the Warner Bros. movies from the 2000s. The Quidditch field outside the classrooms looks a lot humbler in size, as well as faintly more stately with its Victorian-flavored markings; and Paapa Essiedu is teasing a more youthful and, perhaps, even more openly anti-Potter Severus Snape when he menaces, “Let’s hope you show some talent with the Quidditch pitch, Potter. You’ve certainly not exhibited any in here.”
The last line feels subtly counterintuitive to how Alan Rickman might have read the same dialogue 25 years ago… and therefore desperately needed because despite new castings and other seemingly arbitrary divergences from the production design choices of Columbus and WB a quarter-century ago, the film feels inescapably familiar. Which is both its advantage as a piece of IP extension and its burden as a creative endeavor.
To be clear, it is far too early to pass any sort of judgment or critique on what HBO and showrunner Francesca Gardiner has achieved in their adaptation. But the main challenge of the series remains in the foreground throughout the sizzle reel: why make this again? Admittedly, it’s a question that’s dogged any remake going back to the days of when MGM would shamelessly churn out technicolor versions of their own black-and-white classics from 20 years prior. But at that time, there was no home media, no memes, and no YouTube clips to accompany audiences’ childhood nostalgia.
There was also no need to feel obligated to remain slavishly faithful to the same source material. The alleged advantage of the Harry Potter TV series is that by making each season run 8-10 hours, it will doubtlessly have more time to carefully dramatize every single scene and inflection of Rowling’s pen, which previously had to be amended, shortened, and even supplemented with directors’ own ideas in a cinematic format. This is visible simply by virtue of the TV show having the correct UK title with “Philosopher” in lieu of “Sorcerer.” Nonetheless, the core elements folks love in these stories—the life-defining friendships between Harry, Hermione, and Ron, Quidditch, the sorting hat, or Dumbledore’s twinkly mentorship versus Snape’s foreboding alternative—were all faithfully adapted the first-time round. Beautifully so in many instances.
The first teaser for Harry Potter intrigued me more since the lonely isolation of Harry’s childhood as an unwanted and unloved orphan in his aunt and uncle’s home is an aspect of the story the film series barely examined. Yet I imagine this trailer will win more fans based purely on it tickling the nostalgia of the aspects of the story that so many fondly cherish. It might be nice to be on the Hogwarts stomping grounds again, but I’m not convinced yet this will feel like anything more than a 20-year reminisce about glory days gone by.
Harry Potter premieres on Christmas Day on HBO and HBO Max.
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