The controversy surrounding Rowling’s involvement with the series as an executive producer has honestly been a blight on the series since it was announced, and when you add in other things like star Paapa Essiedu facing horrific racist backlash for playing a “white character” (Potions master Severus Snape) and the reveal that the show won’t have an annual release schedule, it feels almost too easy to see the writing on the wall here.
Involving that hateful bitch alone means I will never, ever see this, even pirated.
(HP movies director Chris) Columbus, looking at shots of Dominic McLaughlin’s Harry Potter and Nick Frost’s kindly but bumbling Hogwarts groundskeeper Rubeus Hagrid, was quite blunt about the shots … and prescient about the whole thing. “So I’m seeing these photographs … and he’s wearing the exact same costume that we designed for Hagrid,” Columbus said on a podcast (via People Magazine). “Part of me was like, ‘What’s the point?’ I thought everything was going to be different, but it’s more of the same. It’s all going to be the same.”
Damn, that’s harsh, but true.
The movies really fleshed out a lot of the visual style of what Harry Potter looks like. And I guess they feel they need to slot into that.
Nick Frost seems like he’s gonna do great. But I can’t help but feel like all of the cast are off-brand versions of the original. Just on appearance alone.
But you look at something like Dune, which has had a zillion TV and movie adaptations, or even Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy which has TV and a movie, and the lack of creative effort on HP TV so far is remarkable.
If you look at Star Trek, they could at least keep the look similar when the same TV casts came back for their various movies, but the HP movies started 25 years ago in 2001. The cast is obviously completely different, with the then-child movie stars now entering middle age.
But to keep the “look and feel” exactly the same after 25 years is… at best weird, and at worst creatively bankrupt.
