Will there be a Harry Potter and the Cursed Child movie?

Tickets for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child are selling like mad. Can a Hollywood adaptation be far behind?

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Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is currently doing gangbusters business on all fronts. The script book is bringing the glory days of Harry Potter blowouts back to bookstores and the London stage show is sold out from here to eternity. In the context, the question isn’t so much whether we’re going to get a movie so much as when will we get a movie.

The reasons why Hollywood should want to adapt Cursed Child for the big screen are obvious: money money money. The script book sold two million copies in two days, for heaven’s sake, in an era where books sales are falling. That’s catnip to producers.

It took Hollywood a little over four years to adapt J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which came out in 1997, for the big screen. We’ve heard nothing concrete about the prospects of Cursed Child making the leap, but you know studios were sniffing around the second it was announced—you just know it. Unlike with Sorcerer’s Stone, they don’t have to wait for Cursed Child to become a hit—it’s already there, and it was pretty much guaranteed to become one from the beginning.

There’s also the fact that Cursed Child, as written, is extremely cinematic, almost too much so. By that I mean that some of the stage directions are so ambitious that you wonder why Rowling and her collaborators didn’t take the idea right to a major movie studio to begin with. Characters have conversations while treading water in a lake, others fly, one blows up like a balloon and floats away, staircases shift in space, bookcases take people hostage, one character’s hands turn into knives…the list goes on.

Those kinds of visuals are not the sort of thing you’ll see in a small-scale stage—any eventual community theater productions of Cursed Child will have to cut waaaaaay back. Cursed Child needs major resources to work, and major resources are Hollywood’s speciality. If you want to take a conspiracy theorist’s point of view, you could even say that Rowling and author Jack Thorne wrote the stage directions with Hollywood movie magic in mind. Did I mention that one characters’ hands turn into knives? How does that not call out for a special effects wizard?

Finally, the fact that Cursed Child comes in two parts plays right into Hollywood’s current love of stretching things out. If Warner Bros. can make three movies out of The Hobbit, it can certainly make two, and probably more, out of Cursed Child. And with the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them series kicking off later this year, the time is ripe for Harry Potter stories to return to the big screen. A Cursed Child movie is a blank check for Warner Bros. All it has to do is write it.

So those are all my reasons why Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is ripe for a big screen adaptation. Assuming they’re all sound, the next question is: why haven’t we heard that a film is in production? We’ve heard about the play going on tour, but nothing about a movie. What gives?

That’s hard to say. It’s possible that Rowling, who’s always been savvy about retaining the rights to her creations, isn’t allowing it to go forward. In fact, that’s the only explanation I can think of, since if it were left purely up to theater and movie executives, I feel like the movie would already be in cineplexes.

What reasons might she have for delaying things? Maybe she wants to let the play breathe for a while before giving it an adaption. I suppose there’s an outside chance she thinks it wouldn’t work on screen, but again I say: there’s a character whose hands turn into knives. Cursed Child is made for the movies.

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Or, seeing as Rowling is currently cutting her screenwriting teeth on the Fantastic Beasts series, perhaps she’s waiting until she has the time to write the Cursed Child adaptation herself? Whatever happens, I’m convinced that we’ll be getting a Cursed Child movie sooner or later. And now we play the waiting game.

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