When Will They Reboot "Harry Potter"? Probably Sooner Than You'd Like

Expecto disappointment.

It took Sony just four years to reboot Spider-Man with Andrew Garfield, following Tobey Maguire’s final flight. For the second reboot, Sony really didn’t faff around. Tom Holland was in the Spidey-suit just two years after Garfield had sent his off to the drycleaners for the last time.

Keep the parable of the shifting Spidermen in mind as you read the following article.

The final Harry Potter movie—Deathly Hallows Part 2—arrived in cinemas seven years ago this week. The first instalment of the eight-film series—which collectively grossed $US7 billion worldwide—opened a literal dog’s age ago, in 2001. I say all of this to set the stage for the inevitable: Hollywood will reboot Harry Potter in our lifetimes.

And, given recent Hollywood history, the reboot is probably much closer than you’d like to accept.

This is the realisation Reddit came to yesterday, when user wunderfuzz posted the ultimate 'shower thought' to the Showerthoughts subreddit: "One day there is going to be a reboot of the Harry Potter movies, and an entire generation of us is going to hate everything about it."

There’s no point arguing with it. This will happen. And it will probably happen multiple times, until they can no longer milk Harry Potter for knuts, sickles and galleons.

But the question is: When?

The Spider-Man example above suggests it could happen at any moment. Other recently rebooted franchises—from Batman to Fantastic Four to Planet of the Apes to The Mummy—suggests 10 years after the last instalment is about as long as producers with rights to a juicy property are willing to wait.

However, there are a few factors when it comes to Harry Potter that might buy us some time.

Firstly, director David Yates and author/screenwriter J.K. Rowling are only one film deep into their proposed five-film Fantastic Beasts saga, with the second entry, The Crimes of Grindelwald, due in November. These five are part of the extended Wizarding World that includes the original Harry Potters.

Of course, if Grindelwald tanks at the box office, all plans for an extended cinematic universe will be immediately abandoned. Yet seeing how the first Fantastic Beasts made $US814 million worldwide in 2016 and this next entry will introduce young, sexy Dumbledore, played by Jude Law, we wouldn’t bet against it.

Given that Part 3 is expected to hit cinemas in 2020, you can probably assume Part 4 will follow in 2022 and Part 5 will wrap things up in 2024, carrying on the two-year gaps between entries.

So, is 2025 the year of the Harry Potter reboot? Probably not, and here’s why…

In 2025, original Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe will be 35 years old. That’s just two years shy of Harry’s age in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the stage-only sequel produced for London’s West End (which is now enjoying a successful run on Broadway and is headed to Melbourne in 2019).

Is it so crazy to think that Rowling and her fellow producers are aiming to wrap up their Wizarding World with a Cursed Child adaptation that actually stars the age-appropriate Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint as Harry, Hermione and Ron? It would certainly look a lot better than the ageing-up makeup from the end of Deathly Hallows Part 2.

So, let’s take a not-so-massive leap and assume Cursed Child will hit cinemas anytime between 2025 and 2027. Should they announce a full reboot of the saga after that point, it will come just as the children who grew up on the originals have little ones of their own to take to the cinema (or however we'll experience content in 2027; that might even mean a TV series).

This means you have about seven to ten years to start preparing yourself emotionally, and hopefully reacting to whatever comes next with a bit more self-respect than the old-school Star Wars stans.

That is, unless everyone behind the scenes gets greedy and decides to run the Wizarding World and a rebooted one concurrently. Again, look to the Spider-verse, and DC, because that’s what’s happening over there.

The truth: It is a beautiful and terrible thing.

Header Image: Warner Bros. Pictures