Alas, Rowling and Co. weren’t interested in Cursed Child movies, at least not then, which isn’t too surprising. Lead stage producers Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender knew the life-cycle of a hit Broadway play, which is typically to milk the theater and touring and cruise ship grosses before greenlighting a film, a la Wicked. Plus, moving on to Cursed Child would have been an admission that Fantastic Beasts wasn’t working, a tough pill for Rowling to swallow because she was so creatively involved. Then a few months after that meeting, Rowling was quasi-canceled after she doubled-down on anti-transgender comments, the Potter leads Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson began distancing themselves from her, and later in 2020, Emmerich fired Depp from the third Fantastic Beasts after a U.K. court ruled that The Sun’s description of him as a “wife beater” of Amber Heard was substantially true. Secrets of Dumbledore came out this July, overshadowed in part by Depp’s U.S. defamation battle with Heard. It grossed just $405 million on a $200 million production budget, the first of the 11 Rowling films to lose money.

So that’s what Zaslav and his new film chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy are walking into here. Not great. Fantastic Beasts, which Tsujihara said would be a five-film franchise, is almost certainly dead after three. There are zero Harry Potter films or TV projects in development, meaning that even if Zaz charmed Rowling and closed a deal tomorrow, nothing would hit until probably 2025 or later. And Rowling herself is semi-radioactive: I don’t think the average Potter fan would avoid her work because she’s made hurtful comments about trans people and biological sex, but key talent might decline to work with her, and the media mostly treats her as toxic. (In 2020, New York magazine’s The Cut called her “the most beloved, most reviled children’s book author in history.”) Even the framing on the trade stories last week around Zaslav’s desire to do more with Potter was that he is pushing forward despite her diminished place in the culture.

But at the same time, the Potter property is alive and thriving everywhere except on screen. The books are still huge, as are games and consumer products and live experiences, like the wildly popular Leavesden attraction outside London. Warners profits from all that, as well as the Potter areas in the Universal theme parks, though it doesn’t collect a piece of the gate at those parks, as some at Warners believe the studio should. And if your neighborhood was anything like mine on Halloween, it was filled with kids dressed as Rowling’s characters. The demand for more Potter content is certainly there. Zaz knows that. …

But as desperate as Zaz is for more Potter, remakes seem extra desperate. And doing so without Rowling’s buy-in would nuke that relationship. They need her, and, as rich as she is, she needs them less. Never a good dynamic in which to take a risk on a partnership. The reality is that, no matter what Zaz wants or needs for WBD, the future of the franchise is almost entirely up to a creator with a complicated public persona and an iron grip on her property.