Today’s much-anticipated release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 marks the beginning of the end for the HP movie franchise. But just because there are no more books to adapt doesn’t mean Warner Bros.’ cash cow is completely dead. Sure it would be totally sacrilegious to imagine the future exploits of Ron, Harry, and Hermione without J.K. Rowling’s stamp of approval, but the Potter-verse is full of supporting characters who practically demand spinoff movies or TV shows of their own. Herewith eight of our suggestions for how WB might keep the franchise alive.
How better to soften the image of Harry’s douchey platinum-haired nemesis Draco Malfoy and his associates, Crabbe and Goyle, than by having them care for a conveniently abandoned muggle baby. Will they learn tolerance and responsibility, or just a bunch of spells for dealing with dirty diapers?
In 2007, while promoting the final HP book, J.K. Rowling revealed that the great wizard Albus Dumbledore was gay, a fact never even hinted at in her writing. The books do, however refer to Dumbledore’s wild, lost, younger years. Why not take this unexplored story line, hire Tom Ford to direct, and make a movie for Harry Potter’s art-house fans, a serious-minded prequel — think A Single Man, with spells instead of spellbinding interior decoration — about the time when Dumbledore came into his own and started growing that beard.
According to Deathly Hallows’ epilogue (spoiler alert!), Neville Longbottom grows up and returns to Hogwarts as a professor of herbology. But what if he also — in a weekly hour-long TV comedy — inherited the school’s Frog Choir from Professor Flitwick and upgraded it into a pop-singing glee club? Neville’s at least as charismatic as Glee’s Mr. Schue, the Harry Potter universe includes much cooler potential musical guest stars than Josh Groban, and we’d take show-choired British pub rock over refried Journey any day.
Hogwarts student Luna Lovegood never brushes her hair, dresses like a hobo, has a traumatic past, and mumbles to herself when she’s not saying something surprisingly perceptive or refreshingly straightforward. In short, she is a manic pixie dream girl just waiting to seduce some emo boy in a romantic drama all her own. Zach Braff (a total Hufflepuff, by the way), keep her in mind for your next movie!
Listen, Warner Bros. — Zach Galifianakis is tired of acting wacky on road trips (and probably just exhausted in general — the guy’s starred in ten movies in these past two years). Luckily, you have another lovably outsize, hirsute character in your stable who is more than ready to set out on a wacky road trip of his own: Hagrid. Get that half-giant on his motorbike, throw the undersize Professor Flitwick in his side car, and you’ve got yourself an odd couple to rival Galifianakis and Downey Jr. If people loved the tiger in The Hangover, just imagine how crazy they’ll go for giant spiders.
The Harry Potter movies got better as they got darker. So why not really go nuts with a completely humorless, Christopher Nolan–style origin-story movie on Severus Snape, the franchise’s most compellingly tortured, morally conflicted antihero?
Now that docs like Waiting for “Superman” and The Lottery have put the spotlight on charter-school admissions, moviegoers are practically clamoring for a comedy in which, owing to budget cuts at Hogwarts, the Sorting Hat is forced to find new employment assigning children to competitive kindergarten programs.
Ever wondered what the teachers of Hogwarts talk about when the students aren’t around? Imagine a single-camera Office-style sitcom following the extra-classroom exploits of the faculty as they deal with school bureaucracy, gripe about their students over butter beers, and manage their own complicated personal lives.
