HBO Bets Everything: The Potter Trailer Lands
What Netflix understood with Squid Game and what HBO is now attempting with the Harry Potter series reboot is the same thing: familiarity is not nostalgia, it is infrastructure.
Dua Mifsud | Cinema & Series
The Harry Potter trailer dropped and the internet did exactly what the internet always does — it lost its mind for forty-eight hours and then moved on. But I am not the internet, so I stayed.
What Netflix understood with Squid Game and what HBO is now attempting with the Harry Potter series reboot is the same thing: familiarity is not nostalgia, it is infrastructure. You are not selling people a new story. You are selling them the same story with better production values and the quietly radical argument that the original was a rough draft. The new trailer for HBO's Harry Potter series does something the films never quite managed — it slows down. It lets Hogwarts breathe. The stone corridors are damp. The candles actually flicker like something is wrong with them. Harry's first year at the school, which the Philosopher's Stone adaptation compressed into a greatest-hits reel, here looks like it might actually take a year.
The casting is the gamble, and it is a real one. These are not yet faces the audience has grown up with, which means the performance has to carry what star power cannot. The trailer is careful not to overexpose the leads for exactly this reason — you get impressions, not introductions. Smart. Whether the series itself is smart is a question that will be answered when it airs, not now.
Meanwhile in Venice — and I will say this quickly because I have already spent enough time in that particular orbit this week — John Malkovich is being John Malkovich about his Oscar buzz for *Wild Horse Nine*, which means he is deflecting beautifully and saying things like "they'll retire me when it's time," which is the most John Malkovich sentence a human being has ever constructed. He has been doing this for four decades. He will do it for four more. And somewhere in the same festival, Joe Russo has admitted that *Avengers: Doomsday* was filmed without a finished script, which either sounds like chaos or sounds exactly like how every Marvel film has been made since 2015 and we just weren't supposed to know.
The Potter trailer is the thing, though. Because the question it is actually asking is not whether this version is better than the films. The question is whether a generation that grew up on the films will accept a version that treats the books as the source, not the adaptation as the memory.
That is a more interesting question than anything Marvel has asked in years.
