The First Harry Potter HBO Sequence Trailer Appears to be like Like All the things We Feared

In August of 2025, Chris Columbus — who directed the primary two authentic “Harry Potter” films and produced the third earlier than bowing out of the franchise — addressed some set pictures he’d seen of the small-screen reboot for HBO. Columbus, taking a look at photographs of Dominic McLaughlin’s Harry Potter and Nick Frost’s kindly however bumbling Hogwarts groundskeeper Rubeus Hagrid, was fairly blunt concerning the photographs … and prescient about the entire thing. “So I am seeing these pictures … and he is sporting the very same costume that we designed for Hagrid,” Columbus mentioned on a podcast (through Individuals Journal). “A part of me was like, ‘What is the level?’ I assumed the whole lot was going to be completely different, nevertheless it’s extra of the identical. It is all going to be the identical.”

Months later, Columbus was confirmed precisely proper. The primary teaser trailer dropped at the moment for the HBO collection, formally titled “Harry Potter and the Thinker’s Stone,” and after I watched it, I used to be completely flabbergasted by how acquainted all of it appeared. The home that belongs to Harry’s non-magical aunt and uncle, Vernon and Petunia Dursley (Daniel Rigby and Bel Powley), the place he spends his total childhood after his mother and father die? It seems the identical. The Hogwarts Specific that brings Harry and his two new buddies, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger (Alastair Stout and Arabella Stanton), to high school? The identical. The hallways of that establishment, Hogwarts Faculty of Witchcraft and Wizardry? The identical.

I really feel like I am being gaslit — particularly, gaslit by a tv present that hasn’t even come out but. It is simply unbelievably irritating that, in any case this buildup, it seems like we’re getting what quantities to a shot-for-shot remake. So are there any new scenes? Sure, however put together to be disillusioned!

Proper at first of the teaser trailer, we see one thing that most likely appeared unfamiliar to a number of “Harry Potter followers: specifically, a non-magical Muggle faculty the place a gaggle of bullies is tormenting Harry. (Notably, a type of bullies is his odious cousin Dudley Dursley, portrayed on this collection by Amos Kitson). I am extraordinarily aware of the books, so I did instantly marvel if we’re really going to see a scene alluded to within the first e-book the place, mid-bullying, Harry by accident teleports to the roof of his faculty and will get in bother for climbing, despite the fact that he swears to his aunt and uncle that he will need to have been carried there by a powerful breeze. (Harry is canonically fairly clever, however he is additionally actually dumb a number of the time.)

So, is that it? I do know we’ll get like, seven or eight episodes of this actually quick story — the primary e-book, “Thinker’s Stone,” is fairly temporary, so this “season devoted to every e-book” method will work higher if and when it continues into the bigger tomes — and there shall be new content material scattered all through the season. Nonetheless, I really cannot imagine that the one new scenes within the teaser boil right down to “Harry will get the crap kicked out of him.” 

I have been fairly mouthy, normally, about how I believe this reboot is kind of destined to fail, and I truthfully agree with Chris Columbus that it feels pointless. So did the rest on this teaser trailer get my hopes up? Not likely!

If I have to, I’ll say one good factor concerning the trailer: the children are very cute and really charming. Alastair Stout, specifically, will get an enthralling highlight proper on the finish of the trailer as his Ron Weasley marvels at Harry’s scar (which is slightly subtler on this present, apparently, than it was within the films), and Dominic McLaughlin looks as if he’ll do a terrific job taking part in Harry. The remainder of it, although, didn’t encourage a lot confidence.

I used to be a significant, super-involved “Harry Potter” obsessive for years till 2020, when collection creator Joanne “J.Ok.” Rowling noticed match to make use of her huge worldwide platform to denigrate trans girls below the guise of “defending” cisgender girls. (Trans girls are girls, and me saying stuff like that’s nearly positively why Rowling blocked me on X.) The controversy surrounding Rowling’s involvement with the collection as an govt producer has truthfully been a blight on the collection because it was introduced, and whenever you add in different issues like star Paapa Essiedu going through horrific racist backlash for enjoying a “white character” (Potions grasp Severus Snape) and the reveal that the present will not have an annual launch schedule, it feels nearly too simple to see the writing on the wall right here.

All of that is to say that I simply do not assume it is possible for this present to adapt all seven books and stay on the air — or dangle on to its viewership, if it does — and the trailer did not make me any extra hopeful. In any case, the collection begins airing this Christmas, so we’ll need to see how the debut season goes.