The First Harry Potter HBO Series Trailer Looks Like Everything We Feared

In August of 2025, Chris Columbus — who directed the first two original "Harry Potter" movies and produced the third before bowing out of the franchise — addressed some set photos he'd seen of the small-screen reboot for HBO. Columbus, looking at shots of Dominic McLaughlin's Harry Potter and Nick Frost's kindly but bumbling Hogwarts groundskeeper Rubeus Hagrid, was quite blunt about the shots ... and prescient about the whole thing. "So I'm seeing these photographs ... and he's wearing the exact same costume that we designed for Hagrid," Columbus said on a podcast (via People Magazine). "Part of me was like, 'What's the point?' I thought everything was going to be different, but it's more of the same. It's all going to be the same."

Months later, Columbus was proven exactly right. The first teaser trailer dropped today for the HBO series, officially titled "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone," and when I watched it, I was absolutely flabbergasted by how familiar it all looked. The house that belongs to Harry's non-magical aunt and uncle, Vernon and Petunia Dursley (Daniel Rigby and Bel Powley), where he spends his entire childhood after his parents die? It looks the same. The Hogwarts Express that brings Harry and his two new friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger (Alastair Stout and Arabella Stanton), to school? The same. The hallways of that institution, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? The same.

I feel like I'm being gaslit — specifically, gaslit by a television show that hasn't even come out yet. It's just unbelievably frustrating that, after all this buildup, it looks like we're getting what amounts to a shot-for-shot remake. So are there any new scenes? Yes, but prepare to be disappointed!

Right at the beginning of the teaser trailer, we see something that probably looked unfamiliar to a lot of "Harry Potter fans: namely, a non-magical Muggle school where a group of bullies is tormenting Harry. (Notably, one of those bullies is his odious cousin Dudley Dursley, portrayed in this series by Amos Kitson). I'm extremely familiar with the books, so I did immediately wonder if we're actually going to see a scene alluded to in the first book where, mid-bullying, Harry accidentally teleports to the roof of his school and gets in trouble for climbing, even though he swears to his aunt and uncle that he must have been carried there by a strong breeze. (Harry is canonically pretty intelligent, but he's also really dumb a lot of the time.)

So, is that it? I know we'll get like, seven or eight episodes of this really short story — the first book, "Philosopher's Stone," is pretty brief, so this "season devoted to each book" approach will work better if and when it continues into the larger tomes — and there will be new content scattered throughout the season. Still, I truly can't believe that the only new scenes in the teaser boil down to "Harry gets the crap kicked out of him." 

I've been pretty mouthy, in general, about how I think this reboot is more or less destined to fail, and I honestly agree with Chris Columbus that it feels pointless. So did anything else in this teaser trailer get my hopes up? Not really!

If I must, I will say one nice thing about the trailer: the kids are very cute and very charming. Alastair Stout, in particular, gets a charming spotlight right at the end of the trailer as his Ron Weasley marvels at Harry's scar (which is a little subtler in this show, apparently, than it was in the movies), and Dominic McLaughlin seems like he'll do a great job playing Harry. The rest of it, though, did not inspire much confidence.

I was a major, super-involved "Harry Potter" obsessive for years until 2020, when series author Joanne "J.K." Rowling saw fit to use her enormous worldwide platform to denigrate trans women under the guise of "protecting" cisgender women. (Trans women are women, and me saying stuff like that is almost definitely why Rowling blocked me on X.) The controversy surrounding Rowling's involvement with the series as an executive producer has honestly been a blight on the series since it was announced, and when you add in other things like star Paapa Essiedu facing horrific racist backlash for playing a "white character" (Potions master Severus Snape) and the reveal that the show won't have an annual release schedule, it feels almost too easy to see the writing on the wall here.

All of this is to say that I just don't think it's feasible for this show to adapt all seven books and remain on the air — or hang on to its viewership, if it does — and the trailer didn't make me any more hopeful. In any case, the series starts airing this Christmas, so we'll have to see how the debut season goes.