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We finally have the first footage of the new Harry Potter show that HBO will premiere on Christmas Day, and boy does it look pretty bad.
The first scene from HBO’s ‘HARRY POTTER’ has been released. https://t.co/h3o8nirX5M
— One Take 🎬 (@OneTakeNews) November 15, 2026
I grew up toward the tail end of the Harry Potter book craze. It was (for better or for worse) the first book series that I can really remember reading and I was a big fan at the time. I was not, however, a big fan of the movies. Beyond the adaptation of the Lord of the Rings, I’m not really aware of a film adaptation of a book that has done justice to the original work.
That certainly appears to be the case here. I will qualify my opinion with the fact that this is only a minute long clip, but I do not have high hopes for this project. The lighting feels dull and boring. The chanting is weird. The characters don’t really appear to capture the whimsy of the series. That’s before we get into any of the woke race swapping they’re doing to appeal to their target cat-mom audience.
Turning the books into a show seems like it will be its own disaster as well. The very yearly books were most certainly meant to be children’s books. They’re extremely short and not exactly complicated, and could easily be read over an afternoon. Yet, the show runners believe that they can turn that into an entire season of television?
Audible recently released a full cast audiobook for each installment of the series. The first one had a nearly nine hour run time. Somehow they are going to manage to stretch that into six hours of on-screen content?
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HBO’s HARRY POTTER series episode runtimes have reportedly leaked: Episode 1 – 58 minutes
Episode 2 – 39 minutes
Episode 3 – 44 minutes
Episode 4 – 41 minutes
Episode 5 – 46 minutes
Episode 6 – 37 minutes
Episode 7 – 42 minutes
Episode 8 – 1 hour 2 minutes That’s over three hours more footage than the first Harry Potter movie adaptation. ⚡— cinesthetic. (@TheCinesthetic) November 9, 2026
The project almost certainly won’t fail simply due to the fact that it is Harry Potter. It’s a reboot of one of the most popular and iconic pieces of media in the last 40 years. If the one minute clip of what we’ve seen thus far is anything to go off of, perhaps it should fail. The media continue to push out slop and that slop is consumed gleefully by audiences.
The only way to get these Hollywood producers to make something interesting and engaging is to stop falling for their low-effort money grabs.
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