One ‘Harry Potter’ franchise director has weighed in on the HBO reboot

The director was responsible for the first two installments in the original franchise.

By Joe Allen Published January 20, 2025

Harry Potter holding a wand and looking disappointed. — Warner Bros.

From 2001 to 2011, the Harry Potter franchise was one of the most dominant ongoing franchises in Hollywood. The final installments seemed to cement the franchise as the definitive version of this story but in an era filled with reboots, it was only a matter of time before they came for Harry Potter. As casting news continues to leak out about the new Harry Potter series that HBO is developing, one of the original franchise’s directors has weighed in on the new version of the story.

“The fact that they have the leisure of [multiple] episodes for each book, I think that’s fantastic,” director Christopher Columbus told People. “You can get all the stuff in the series that we didn’t have an opportunity to do … all these great scenes that we just couldn’t put in the films.”

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Columbus directed the first two installments of the film series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Those films are both quite long, but the plan for the HBO series is for each season to cover a single book. As a result, the show will have more space to fill in the details of the universe, and more closely adapt J.K. Rowling’s original novels.

As the show continues to cast for many of its more crucial roles, we still don’t know much about who will play the three children at the center of the series. Like Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint, these kids will be signing up for a decade of work, and will have to saddle the expectations of thousands of fans.

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Joe Allen is a freelance culture writer based in upstate New York. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The…

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