At Warner Bros., to calm the spirits of shareholders, they rushed to announce that they wanted to produce a Harry Potter series that would cover the same seven Hogwarts courses as the films started by Chris Columbus. In January 2021, in theory they were looking for the scriptwriter who could bring a new vision to the same story. And, after two years without news about the project, at this time the showrunner who should launch the series has not yet been announced.
As Deadline reports, the studio has three names on the table where the person responsible should come from. Of course, the American media knows the five names involved so far. These are Martha Hillier, Kathleen Jordan, Tom Moran, Michael Lesslie and, as a last minute option, also Francesca Gardiner, taking advantage of the fact that she has just finished her collaboration on Succession, the most awarded series of the last five years with three Emmy awards for best drama from the television.
Martha Hillier, for example, left EastEnders, one of the most legendary soap operas in British fiction, where she worked as a producer. She has experience in fictions far from contemporary realism: between 2020 and 2022 she was a scriptwriter and producer of The last kingdom.
Kathleen Jordan, on the other hand, is known for having created Missing Bullets, a Netflix youth comedy well received by critics but canceled after one season.
Tom Moran has a more adult profile: he has been in the science fiction series The Feed and his last television project was The Devil’s Hour, the crime and supernatural thriller with Peter Capaldi.
Michael Lesslie could be in a good position. Screenwriter of the thriller The Girl with the Drum, which adapted the novel by John Le Carré, he has just scored a success in movie theaters with a similar profile: he wrote the script for The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the prequel from The Hunger Games.
And, as for Gardiner, her profile goes beyond her role as a producer on Succession. She was in the comedy thriller Killing Eve as a producer, she entered a historical and dystopian universe with The Man in the High Castle as a screenwriter and she was involved in the texts of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, a public intellectual property similar to Harry Potter.
These five screenwriters have the difficult mission of showing how to take advantage of the work of J.K. Rowling on television, being faithful to the story but not repeating the exact formula of the films, which grossed $7.7 billion between 2001 and 2011, and are still a valuable asset for Warner Bros.
The British writer, who never gave up creative control when negotiating with Warner Bros, is part of the committee to choose the scriptwriters in charge of bringing Harry, Ron and Hermione to the small screen through Max, Warner Bros Discovery’s content platform In U.S.A.
