The play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has gotten a new logo reminiscent of the Harry Potter movies. However, Warner Bros. Pictures isn’t working on a film adaptation… not yet, anyway.

The Boy Who Lived’s battle with Lord Voldemort came to a close in 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, about four years after J.K. Rowling published her final Harry Potter book. Since then, the Wizarding World has returned to the big screen with the Fantastic Beasts movies, a prequel series that chronicles the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald’s rise to power in the lead-up to WWII. Meanwhile, Harry’s story has continued with Cursed Child, a play Jack Thorne wrote based on the story he cooked up with John Tiffany and Rowling.

Naturally, Harry Potter fans got excited when Rowling posted a mysterious tweet and tagged it with #HarryPotter and #CursedChild on Thursday. The tweet featured a version of the Dark Mark (the symbol used by Voldemort’s followers, the Death Eaters) and simply read “Sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places”. Unfortunately, the ultimate reveal was far less exciting. Turns out, this is just the new tagline for the Cursed Child play, which unveiled some brand-new artwork (similar to the Harry Potter films) in NYC’s Times Square last night. You can watch a video of the event below (courtesy of Twitter user monica kim).

Now that WB owns a majority share in Cursed Child, this appears to be a bit of rebranding on their part. There’ve been rumors about them making a Cursed Child film adaptation since the play premiered in 2016, but that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, for a couple reasons. First, WB is currently in the midst of pre-production on Fantastic Beasts 3 and still hopes to make another two sequels after that, despite the lackluster critical response and box office under-performance of last year’s The Crimes of Grindelwald. Fantastic Beasts 3 isn’t scheduled to arrive until 2021, so it may be a while before the series wraps up.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, Cursed Child starts off during the epilogue to Deathly Hallows, where Harry, Hermione, and Ron are all much older and sending their own kids off to study at Hogwarts. Fans would no doubt want to have Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint back playing those roles in a Cursed Child movie, so WB will have to wait until enough time has passed for them to realistically do that (without the dubious aging-up makeup they had to wear in Deathly Hallows: Part 2’s final scene). By that point, the film should be able to successfully tap into nostalgia for its predecessors, similar to what Disney’s Star Wars movies have done.

We will bring you more Harry Potter-related news as it comes our way.

Source: J.K. Rowling, monica kim

  • Fantastic Beasts 3 Release Date: 2022-04-15