Money Trumps Woke: HBO Max Eyes ‘Harry Potter’ Series
Cancel Culture loathes J.K. Rowling, but Warner Bros. Discovery needs cash
No one has faced a more relentless Cancel Culture assault than J.K. Rowling.
The mind behind the “Harry Potter” franchise went from a literary icon to Public Enemy No. 1 to the Left when she deviated from the trans community’s playbook in 2020.
And, since the Left includes academia, the mainstream media, corporations and Hollywood, that means Rowling has been under constant attack ever since.
Out now:
THE WITCH TRIALS OF J.K. ROWLING
Chapter 7: What If You’re Wrong?*******
In which I ask J.K. Rowling to respond to pushback from her critics.
*******
We’ll be back in a few weeks with an epilogue!APPLE: https://t.co/7AXEQ6No0w
SPOTIFY: https://t.co/xjHtBVPZfy
— Megan Phelps-Roper (@meganphelps) March 28, 2023
That leaves Warner Bros. Discovery with a problem. The company is bleeding red ink and has spent months trying to stop the flow with high-profile cancellations.
The mega company shelved CNN+ after a disastrous launch, canceled a “Batgirl” movie that was anywhere from 80-90 percent complete and has been in a vigorous cost-cutting mode over the past year.
It needs more sure things, properties all but guaranteed to draw eyeballs, clicks and streaming numbers.
Enter Rowling’s “Harry Potter” franchise. Reports say a new “Potter” TV show is in the works.
According to Bloomberg, which was first to report news of developing talks, the project would be directly based on J.K. Rowling’s best-selling book series, rather than an in-universe spinoff such as the “Fantastic Beasts” films. Each season would reportedly draw from one of the books, suggesting an ongoing franchise that would stretch for years for the studio.
Why does this matter?
For starters, this is Rowling’s signature creation, and any “Potter”-themed content comes under new scrutiny from the far Left. We just watched the mob attempt to cancel “Hogwarts Legacy,” a video game with no creative ties to Rowling beyond being set in the Potter universe.
Twitch streamers boycotted the title. Video game journalists trashed it, with Wired saying it could cause “real-world harm.” Social media scolds did all they could to smite its potential success.
That effort failed in spectacular fashion.
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Not only did the game sell briskly — more than 12 million copies were sold in its first two weeks of release — the boycott made little to no impact.
The far-Left Atlantic said it all in covering the game’s roaring success.
If the public response to the game was truly a referendum on J. K. Rowling, she won.
The far-Left Game Rant’s attempt to spin reality proved almost farcical.
This popularity for Hogwarts Legacy spells good news for the future of the franchise and other potential titles down the line, but it may also have an impact on the severity of the controversy that these future projects would face.
This turn of events may have convinced HBO Max that a “Potter” TV project would get a similar reaction. Millions would flock to the show while an embittered minority would lash out, ineffectively, against it.
In short, that’s why woke should be ignored by corporations eager for profits, not virtue signaling points. They don’t represent the will of the people, just an engaged group that will never be satisfied.
Warner Bros. Discovery can no longer afford empty virtue signaling, which explains why it’s flirting with a new Rowling partnership.
As long as they promote it hard and make sure they put J.K. Rowling front & center. Make sure EVERYONE knows she’s fully involved. Also make sure the entire cast and crew sign contracts to never bad mouth the project or the author. Sounds like a billion dollar project.
20 bucks and a case of Corona Ultra says that, if indeed there is an HBO Max series, half the characters will be Alphabet People.
Not only did the HP game not get “cancelled” it broke sales records and dominated online play. It is extremely unlikely that the game would have been such a financial success if the activists hadn’t brought so much attention to it by trying to boycott it.
I am thinking HBO/WB is betting on the same outrage, and betting that it will increase sales to their subscription plan. It is even more likely in that people can subscribe to HBO max and tell their friends it is for the other content (unlike the game). If they don’t botch the story and the casting, this will likely work in their favor.
People never seem to realize the Streisand affect is very real. Heck, the Chik-Fil_A near me still a decade later, has impossibly long lines ever since the activists tried to get everyone to boycott them.
Who says they have to stick to the written word, though? I expect Harry to be a trans man, and Hermione to be a black girl in a wheelchair.
Then again, the last three Potter-verse movies weren’t huge hits like they had hoped. I hope they go back to what made the franchise so popular. It seems as though they did just that with the game.