Anthem Screen Guides Magazine

Not only is it close to 30 years since Bloomsbury published the first Harry Potter novel, it’s a quarter of a century since Warner Bros. put out Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone (or The Sorcerer’s Stone in the US). Those movies, starring Daniel Radcliffe as The Boy Who Lived, are of course brilliant, but we’ve always known they wouldn’t be the final word on Harry Potter. The great stories of our age will always be revived and reinterpreted for different generations and different times, and so it is with JK Rowling’s Wizarding World, with the arrival this Christmas of a major eight-part retelling of that first book.
Starring Dominic McLaughlin as Harry Potter, Alastair Stout as Ron Weasley and Arabella Stanton as Hermione, HBO’s series promises to be the most comprehensive adaptation yet of Rowling’s novels. As beloved as those films are, the writers couldn’t hope to include every character, every subplot and every detail from those increasingly weighty tomes – but at eight episodes per season, HBO’s show has the space to tell those stories on an even grander scale than the movies.
In this Harry Potter special, then, we preview the hotly-anticipated new series while looking back at all eight films. We also have an A-Z of the Potter-verse, a look at some of the franchise’s scene-stealers, and we take trips to the Harry Potter Studio Tour in Leavesden and the currently-running West End stage play, Harry Potter And The Cursed Child. And yes, there’s also a deep dive into the spin-off Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them films and our recommendations for some Harry Potter-alike books, movies and TV shows to gorge on as you wait for HBO’s series.
We hope you enjoy the issue.