I’ll never understand all the rejection from Potterheads towards the upcoming Harry Potter tv show.
I usually hate remakes myself, so I do get where they are coming from, but the thing is:
This is NOT a remake and the films are NOT the original work! The originals are the books, and both the films and tv show are just different adaptations of those books. Full stop!
It happens to every single popular book or book series. Why would Harry Potter be different?
Take Louisa May Alcott’s book “Little women”, for instance. How many adaptations are there? Well, I’ll tell you, because I bothered to Google it:
- Six different film adaptations!
- Four different tv series (one of them being animated);
- A ballet adaptation;
- An opera adaptation;
- Two Broadway plays;
In the Harry Potter case, the new adaptation isn’t even a film, it’s a tv show, a totally different format, a totally different media!
And I absolutely get why people are mad about Snape being black. I also don’t like the fact that Vernon, Dudley and Neville are skinny. I’d much rather see the characters as they are described in the books. That was what I wanted to see. But what really matters is that they capture the essence of the characters (which, let’s be honest, almost no one in the films did, and Snape is one of the biggest examples).
I started reading the books in 2002. I became a fan because of the third book (Prisoner of Azkaban) and later the fifth one (Order of the Phoenix). Can you imagine how robbed I felt by the films? I mean, despite everything, PoA is still my favourite HP film, but in OotP, they cut literally ALL the moments I loved the most in the book except from the twins’ fireworks.
So, everyone who is hating on the tv adaptation should just think that the films are not going anywhere, and that even before they were born, there were already people reading the books and wishing for something more faithful after watching the films. 🥹
So, yes, show me book Snape (in essence, not looks! Rickman didn’t have the looks either and was 60 years old!!)
Show me book Lupin (I’m a huge fan of David Thewlis, and he performed a true miracle being able to capture his essence with the little text and the mixed directions he was given, but where’s his story?)
Show me book Tonks, not the special extra with 9 lines they turned her into in the movies!
Show me book Ron! (I love film Ron, but those are two different people)
Show me book Ginny! (Do I have to say anything?)
Show me book Sirius (Heck, even Gary Oldman himself says he would have played him a lot differently had he read the books before filming!!)
If you’re totally happy with the movies, great for you, keep enjoying them (I will too!), but please, let us book fans watch the characters we read about and fell in love with!
(This was one of my first attempts on drawing an iconic scene from the books. This scene was conveniently ignored by the films.)
