Is Harry Potter Overrated?

“Yer a wizard, Harry!”

Whether you love it, hate it, or can’t get the voice shouting “‘ARRY POTTAH” out of your head, it is undeniably one of the most influential franchises to be released in the last 20 years. It has been around since before our generation was born, and doesn’t seem to have any intention of wrapping up anytime soon with the release of spinoffs such as The Crimes of Grindelwald and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Though J.K Rowling didn’t initially plan on there being as many spinoffs in the first place, especially centered in the US, the franchise is still managing to bring home big bucks at the box office with films that dive deeper into the Harry Potter universe.

The original Harry Potter series ended after the release of The Deathly Hallows Part 2, and it is debatable whether it should have truly ended there. With many franchises it can be cool to see other aspect of the world where the story takes place, but the line between continuing the franchise into another meaningful series and overdoing it is pretty thin. With the Harry Potter franchise it was interesting, for a while at least, seeing how characters who were briefly mentioned in the main series impacted their world later on. Now it appears the story is losing its hype, with The Crimes of Grindelwald not turning out to be as popular as its predecessors. There hasn’t been much word on whether there will be any more big screen spinoffs, though there is word of another one coming out sometime in the future.

When asking Veronika Shcherbynina her opinion on the continuation of the franchise, she said, “as long as they put variety into the new story lines it’s ok. I don’t want to see more about characters we’ve already seen, like Harry Potter, because then I think it gets less interesting.” She also mentioned how it would be cool to learn about new parts of the story, like how wizards work in other countries outside the UK.

Whatever direction the series decides to go, it will certainly be interesting to see which path it takes. It seems unlikely that the series will be ending any time soon with how much potential they still have, but if they do continue adding to the franchise, hopefully they will be thoughtful and create something for their viewer’s enjoyment as opposed to the dollar sign.