Gary Oldman's Promise: HBO Harry Potter Owes Us This
The reasoning is the one book readers have been making since 2001: the films left too much on the floor.
By Dua Mifsud
Gary Oldman has been doing press, which means Gary Oldman has been saying things, and the thing he said about HBO's Harry Potter series is the thing everyone is currently forwarding to their most emotionally invested friend. Sirius Black himself — four films, one dramatic death through a veil, decades of fan grief — has declared that the television adaptation will be "more satisfying" than the movies. The reasoning is the one book readers have been making since 2001: the films left too much on the floor. The series has room to breathe, room to include, room to not compress an entire subplot about house elves and institutional memory into a deleted scene.
He is correct. He is also, let's be precise about this, a man with obvious affection for the franchise rather than a man with any creative control over it — so the prediction is warm and largely decorative. But it lands anyway because Oldman understands the specific grief of the Potter films, which is not that they were bad — several of them were genuinely beautiful, and Prisoner of Azkaban remains a small architectural miracle — but that they were always choosing. Always cutting. Always deciding that this chapter doesn't survive the transition and this character exists only as furniture.
The HBO series, structured to give each book its own season, is the format the story always deserved. That is not a controversial statement. The films were a compression exercise; the books are a density exercise. They are not the same shape. What's interesting is that we are now living in an era where Netflix and HBO have normalised the prestige adaptation to the point where *not* making a Harry Potter series would feel like a missed opportunity rather than restraint.
Luca Guadagnino, meanwhile, has been at Venice arguing that auteur theory has been "bastardised" and that directors don't need to write their own films — which is either a generous position or a convenient one depending on how you feel about his recent output. He's not wrong in the historical sense. Hitchcock didn't write his films. Kubrick adapted constantly. The auteur theory was always a critical framework, not a production requirement. But there is something telling about a director saying this at a festival that celebrates the singular vision — at the precise moment when studio IP is eating the industry whole.
The verdict writes itself: Gary Oldman promises HBO's Harry Potter will be more satisfying. He's probably right. The bar is not the films being bad. The bar is that the films were always grieving what they had to leave behind.
