While the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them series is, somehow, still underway, let’s face it: a Harry Potter movie isn’t quite a Harry Potter movie without, well, Harry Potter. Fortunately for us, Chris Columbus — the director behind The Sorcerer’s Stone and The Chamber of Secrets — completely agrees, and is actually advocating for the Harry and the rest of the golden trio to return in a new entry in the series.
In a recent interview with Variety, the director shared a number of heart-warming stories from the set of the first two Harry Potter films, as well as a “small fantasy” of his: directing an adaption of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child with the main series’ golden trio. According to Columbus, the timing is actually perfect for the director to tackle to project, as Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley), and Emma Watson (Hermione Granger) are now all in their early 30s — roughly the same age as their on-screen counterparts.
“I would love to direct The Cursed Child. It’s a great play and the kids are actually the right age to play those roles. It’s a small fantasy of mine.”
As Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is set around 20 years after the start of the original Harry Potter series, Columbus is spot on in saying that Radcliffe, Grint, and Watson are the perfect age to reprise their former roles — even if it is sometimes a bit hard to see the trio as parental figures rather than brave and mischievous teens. However, with each of the three stars having their own independent, successful, and decidedly more mature careers now, the intense controversy surrounding author J.K. Rowling (which ultimately led to the trio condemning her transphobic sentiments), and the poor reception to the time-skip epilogue in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2, asking the trio to return to the series’ seems a pretty tall order — even if the play they’d be adapting is critically-acclaimed.
Released in 2016, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child went on to win six Tonys during the 2018 awards, including Best Play. It also set the record for the highest weekly ticket sales of all time, shattering the record previously set by All the Way in 2014. For those of you who didn’t catch it before, the two-part play is returning to London, Melbourne, and Hamburg soon, followed by a re-staged, single show version of it that will hit Broadway beginning in November 2021 and San Francisco and Toronto in 2022. And hey, if we’re really lucky, we might even get to see it hit the big screen sometime in the next few years, perhaps even with the original cast and Columbus at the helm.
