The movie industry is in a rough spot. Monopoly capitalism has led to the erosion of even major studios. Warner Bros. is one of the biggest victims. In the wake of Fox's acquisition by Disney, it's the only studio with enough franchise IP to pull in returns on big budget films, and that comes down to two franchises: the DC universe and J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World.
On the former front, the studio is fighting an uphill battle. It knows people love DC superheroes but can't quite figure out how to turn that into a movie anyone wants to watch. Zack Snyder's contributions to the genre have their fans but didn't make enough back at the box office to be worth their critical failure. Suicide Squad was, well, Suicide Squad. Wonder Woman was a revelation, but the sequel was released direct-to-streaming during a pandemic and garnered terrible reviews. Aquaman was a genuine burst of saltwater-themed creative genius and made a billion dollars to boot, but the sequel has been pushed back until 2023. Joker also succeeded but caused controversy and wasn't meant to have a sequel in any case. I could keep going but the point is clear: Warner Bros. doesn't have a clear path forward with its DC lineup.
The last remaining hope is Wizarding World, formerly known as Harry Potter. Until recently, it seemed like nothing could stop muggles from flooding theaters to cram every last morsel of magic into their eyes and ears. In 2013, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 brought in a billion dollars in a single weekend at the worldwide box office. Three years later, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them raked in $800 million after opening, proving that the franchise had staying power even when nothing remained of the original story but the wands.
All of that began to change with the 2018 release of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. Aside from its confusing title, the production was marred by the ongoing controversy around Johnny Depp as the eponymous Grindelwald. Nevertheless, J.K. Rowling held firm on the casting decision. That same year, the first stirrings of Rowling's transphobia came to light when she liked a tweet that disparaged transgender women. Combined with her incessant habit of tweeting worldbuilding details that were both insensitive and didn't exist in the books or movies, it was enough to raise eyebrows. (Her token Jewish wizard is named Anthony Goldstein, which I suppose is better than Moneyhoard Goldgrabber, which I assume was her first idea. If you think that's bad, the Black wizard who actually appears in the books and movies is called, and I wish I were lying, Kingsley Shacklebolt.) By the time of the film's theatrical debut, the aura of saintliness had somewhat evaporated from the beloved author. The movie brought in a comparatively paltry $655 million.
In the four years since, Rowling has spent much of her public-facing energy bitterly denigrating and libeling trans folk—especially trans women—and the activists who fight alongside them. The result has been a steady erosion of her fan base, many of whom are queer, and the evidence is in the box office returns from the third Fantastic Beasts movie. The Secrets of Dumbledore opened in late April to a shockingly low $280 million worldwide.
Looking at those numbers, one can almost hear Warner Bros. execs evacuating their bowels in horror. No one at Warner Bros. could have predicted ten years ago that their most valuable IP would be made nearly worthless by its own creator. It's hard not to feel sorry for them, or at least for the people downstairs from them who won't have jobs if the studio keeps hemorrhaging money.
Rowling's open crusade to deny the trans community access to medical care, equal rights under the law, and social acceptance has come to eclipse her work on the Harry Potter novels in the public eye. It has also caused many former fans to reevaluate those novels in light of her beliefs and find them lacking. Even those who cling to their old and tattered copies are reticent to shell out more dollars into Rowling's media empire. The halcyon years of Harry Potter pub crawls and putting your Hogwarts house in your Tinder bio are over.
The thing about Rowling is that she's never been a particularly talented author. It's easy to get readers to look past terribly contrived plots and blatant contradictions in your world-building when those readers are children. Many such children grew up with the franchise and in adulthood did not want to critically reexamine their cherished memories of the books. If Rowling had not tarnished her personal brand so thoroughly, the reckoning might never have come, but it was spurred on more rapidly by the comparatively lackluster quality of the Fantastic Beasts films.
Rowling recognized that her fans were growing up with her books and worked to ensure that they would never age out of the fandom. A reader who was 11 years old when the first book in the Harry Potter series published—the same age as Harry himself—would have been 20 when they showed up to a Borders bookstore for the midnight release of Deathly Hallows. It's the reason why, from book to book, the series ballooned in length. The first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, sits just under 80,000 words. By comparison, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix thudded onto bookshelves at 257,000 words, way outside the boundaries of a standard young adult series. (For context, George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, a very adult novel indeed, weighs in at about 293,000 words.)
The Harry Potter movies felt as though they grew up with their audience as well. Not only did the main cast transform from children to adults before our eyes with each film, the aesthetics of each also became progressively darker, mirroring the same change in the books. The Fantastic Beasts series attempted to replicate the same trick by meeting that now-adult audience with even more adult themes.
Where Harry Potter began with the 11-year-old boy who lived, the protagonist of Fantastic Beasts is ostensibly* Newt Scamander, a fully grown man with childlike tendencies played by Eddie Redmayne. But, in a stumble which feels reminiscent of George Lucas's Star Wars prequels, the first movie in the series failed by trying to add in wizard politics. The similarities between the two continue when you consider that both series are set before the events of the movies that made their respective franchises popular in the first place.
*Scamander is billed as the protagonist, but as evidenced by the titles of the subsequent movies, the real draw for audiences is supposed to be Jude Law as Dumbledore and Johnny Depp/Mads Mikkelsen as Grindelwald. Because, you know, those are characters people actually remember and like.
When you grow up with something as a major part of your life, you tend not to question it. But as any atheist will tell you, once the questioning begins and the cracks start to show, the façade crumbles entirely. Those who grew up believing that the message of Harry Potter was one of acceptance and equality were forced to confront the fact that its author stands in direct opposition to those values. Like pulling a loose thread on an old sweater, that was the end of it.
For a certain stripe of millennial, the Harry Potter saga felt like growing up, feeling the innocence of the world fall like scales from our eyes along with Harry and his friends. Perhaps, in her betrayal of what fans thought she and her work represented, Rowling taught us another crucial lesson of maturity: never trust your heroes.
Warner Bros. is now learning that lesson, too. Another point they may do well to consider in the future is that tying your financial interests to a franchise run by a single creator is risky business. (To once more use George R.R. Martin for reference, ask HBO how things went when he stalled out on new books to adapt.)
Whether Rowling realizes it or not, the Wizarding World franchise is running on fumes and it is entirely her fault. Five movies were originally planned for the Fantastic Beasts series. A screenplay for the fourth has not yet been written.
So high on her own reputation that she thought herself invincible, Rowling threw away an empire. I have known people so dedicated to the Harry Potter fandom they tattooed their bodies with her words and iconography. Now, they wish they could claw the ink from their skin.
No longer are Rowling's Twitter replies filled with adoring fans of her work. Instead, they're populated by seething transphobes who couldn't tell you the difference between Hogwarts and warthogs, Russian disinformation bots, and people telling her to go fuck herself. Secluded in her Scottish castle, she is a ruler without a kingdom.
Now, Rowling spends her days lunching with leaders of the most vile anti-trans hate group in the UK while trans people—many of whom used to worship her like a god—protest for their fundamental right to exist on the streets below. It's hard to think of a bigger fall from grace in recent memory. To her and to the Wizarding World, I wave my wand and say, "Obliviate."
-M