Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out two years ago, and the final movie hits theaters in less than a month. What’s more, as I write this, J.K. Rowling has a mysterious new website set to premiere in a couple of days. To me that means we should start talking about something important.
How should the Harry Potter series be rebooted?
Not the books, obviously. The books are fine as they are: flawed but lots of fun, hilariously funny in places, completely nuts in others. There’s no need to rewrite them.
But the movie adaptations are something else. Because they’ve been (relatively) faithful to the books, they’re even more wacky and flawed. But who cares? They’re so well cast that we can cruise right past the starved-looking werewolf, Harry’s weird slo-mo eye blink, and the endless Quidditch matches.
And they’ve been a gold mine for the studios.
So we know they’re going to be made again, and sooner than you might think. When that happens, the filmmakers are going to change things to suit the stories they’ll want to tell. They’ll have to; it’s the only way Harry Potter and crew will remain part of our culture. If Dracula can be played by both Frank Langella and George Hamilton, if Sherlock Holmes can team up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and if Romeo and Juliet can be members of dancing New York street gangs, then the folks at Hogwarts will have to change, too.
But how? Here are seven ideas for the inevitable Harry Potter reboot.
1) Harry Potter and the Muggle Invasion: The main advantage a wand has over a gun is versatility. A wand can do many, many things, while a gun can only “cast” an avada kedavra spell–and do it at the squeeze of a trigger, no need to mutter six syllables. Me, I’d rather have a wand (I don’t shoot people more than two or three times a year, but I have wished I could tidy a room with a wave of my hand every single day)… unless, like Voldemort, I was planning to rule over the wizarding and the muggle worlds.
So! Harry and his friends are seventh years, and pure-blood wizards are taking over countries around the world. The Dursleys are one of the few families who know wizards tried this before, because Harry’s mother fought on the side of the muggles, but disappeared before a decisive victory could be achieved. The Weasley family supports the takeover–they wouldn’t have instigated it themselves, but now that it’s started it’s important to remember the many crimes against wizards that drove them into hiding in the first place. Besides, it’s too late to surrender now; what would the muggles do to them all? Muggle-borns like Hermione flock to the muggle military to help them protect their representative governments, but they don’t really trust her, either.
Harry has no choice but to search for his long-missing mother, and the mysterious spell she used to end the last conflict.
2) Dangerous Wands: God, how I hate this kind of movie, but there you go.
3) The (Super)Natural: The books and movies are already way, way too focused on sports, so why not go straight for what audiences like? A sports movie about Quidditch. Base it on Major League, with Harry in the Charlie Sheen role and it’s like printing money.
4) The Maltese Hippogriff: Actually, let’s make this a Hitchcock-style thriller. Someone has poisoned potions master Severus Snape and Harry is the prime suspect. Who can he trust? What happened to the dull brown hippogriff statue that vanished from Snape’s desk when he died? Who is the real killer? (Spoiler: Hermione. No, scratch that. Make it Trelawney)
5) Fort Apache: Knockturn Alley: I’ll bet Ron Moore’s pilot Precinct 17 would have been picked up if the lead had literally been the grown-up Boy Who Lived as an Auror. And speaking of TV:
6) St. Mungo’s: Hermione Granger, newest healer in the hospital, takes on all the toughest cases of weird magical maladies, while clashing with Malfoy, the new administrator. And finally:
7) Batman and Potter: Come on, you know you want to see that.
What about you? Imagine Warner Brothers asked you for a new take on the Harry Potter mythos; what take would you pitch?
Harry Connolly is a Del Rey author who has previously considered a full reboot of Star Wars here on his blog. You can also follow him on Twitter or LiveJournal.
