HBO defended J.K. Rowling’s involvement in its upcoming “Harry Potter” TV series, emphasizing her creative contributions and her right to express personal views despite controversy over her anti-trans statements.
Rowling’s outspoken gender-related beliefs have deeply divided the Harry Potter fanbase, with some advocating for boycotts and others finding ways to reconcile their love for the franchise while opposing her views.
Despite fan backlash and fractured enthusiasm, the “Wizarding World” franchise remains commercially strong, and Rowling appears unfazed by criticism, continuing to focus on her advocacy and involvement in the new series.
Well, yeah, she has a right to free expression.
We have the right to ostracise her and anyone espousing the kind of bigotry she expresses. That’s up to and including HBO or it’s affiliates
But, separate from that, her involvement is a disappointment on quality level. As much as I love the books and goddess movies, the woman is a mid tier writer. Which is still better than most people, but if she’s influencing production decisions along her established works, then the new stuff will be just as flawed as the old because she’s run out of new ideas and is coasting. She’s neither necessary nor useful to a series based on an established set of books
Do you think it would be possible to make the series faithful to the books (or at least more than the films were) without her involvement?
Yes.
How is it that hard? I’m assuming the producers, directors, script-writers and so on can read. The books are not that long (even Phoenix is not that long in the grand scheme of things).
The only reason to get her involved is to provide “extra” background detail that doesn’t appear in the books at which point they have stopped being faithful to the books and are just made up bollocks.
So either you have a series that is faithful to the books, or faithful to her original vision which will be nothing like the books we all know and (I would assume) love, or we get a series that is something like the films which I happen to think were great and – in places – a vast improvement on the books.
Absolutely. All it takes is a competent script writer and director. Adapting a book to a movie is harder because you have to cut material for time. A series based on a book, you have plenty of time, so you can pretty much take the dialogue as written, and the rest is about set construction and costuming with whatever effects are needed.
It isn’t like it was with game of thrones where the series wasn’t finished. Even there, they diverged from the books enough that they didn’t really need Martin the last two seasons if they wanted to diverge even more and ignore what he intended as the finale.
Howard’s legacy is proof the franchise does better left to super fans without her involvement