HBO’s Harry Potter remake: Reddit raises the key question

While most discussion around HBO’s new Harry Potter series focuses on the cast, the visual tone or its faithfulness to the books, a widely discussed Reddit thread raises a more fundamental question that could ultimately determine the project’s success or failure: “What's the ... point?” The discussion was started by Reddit user u/CharakterRant, who asked: “Why not just write a different wizarding school?”

The author assumes that the first episode could well be good. Even so, he feels the project lacks creative appeal: better visuals, greater faithfulness to the books and a new cast would not be enough for him if the series ultimately tells the same story again. To explain his point, the Redditor uses a comparison from gaming: the Demon’s Souls remake may be visually impressive, but at its core it remains the same game. He finds projects such as the Final Fantasy 7 remake more interesting, as they at least explore new narrative ground.

As a positive counterexample, u/CharakterRant points to Hogwarts Legacy. The game uses the familiar wizarding world, but is set around 100 years before the books and therefore tells its own story. That is exactly what he would have liked to see from HBO: not another version of Hogwarts in slightly different form, but another school, new perspectives and original characters. In his view, the debate around Snape’s casting could also have been avoided if the series had not relied on existing characters again.

Community largely agrees, but understands HBO’s reasoning

Many Redditors agree with the basic argument: artistically, the remake seems unnecessary, but economically it makes sense. Hogwarts and Harry Potter simply have more recognition value than a new school without familiar names. Whether the remake ultimately proves creatively redundant will likely depend above all on whether HBO can give the familiar story a noticeably fresh perspective. Much may hinge on scenes from the books that were missing from the films and could give the series more narrative independence.