Hogwarts by subscription: The new Harry Potter series and the billion-dollar business of nostalgia

On Christmas Day, the cupboard under the stairs opens a second time. On Friday, Dec. 25, 2026, HBO will air the first episode of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” It marks the start of a series that is meant to adapt seven books in seven seasons and to run for about 10 years. The first teaser was viewed 277 million times in 48 hours, more often than any trailer in the network’s history. But behind the magic lies a sober calculation: A company that has just changed hands for about $111 billion needs a brand that will tie an entire generation to a subscription. And anyone in Switzerland who wants to go to Hogwarts pays considerably more for the privilege than fans in Germany.

That makes the new Harry Potter series more than a remake. It is a business model, a culture war and an experiment with three children who are expected to carry the project for a decade. Warner Bros. Discovery described the project as the biggest streaming event in the history of HBO Max. Whether it lives up to that will be decided starting at Christmas. What is already settled, what remains open and what the series will cost Swiss viewers: an assessment.

A calculated Christmas present

For a long time, it looked like 2027. As late as November 2024, and again at the end of January 2026, HBO chief Casey Bloys spoke of a premiere in early 2027. Two months later came the reversal: With the first teaser, the network announced on March 25, 2026, that the series would premiere at Christmas 2026, one day before HBO Max launched in Britain and Ireland. HBO gave no detailed reason for the earlier date. Doing the math, however, shows that little changes at the core. If HBO airs the eight episodes weekly, as is customary for its big series, most of the season would fall in 2027 anyway. There is still no official broadcast schedule; the calendars circulating online are fans’ projections.

The impact of the date, by contrast, is measurable. According to Warner Bros. Discovery, the first teaser drew 277 million organic views in 48 hours, more than twice as many as the network’s previous record holder, the second season of “The Last of Us.” After 72 hours, the count stood at 308 million. The second official teaser followed on Sept. 2, 2026, one day after the date on which the Hogwarts Express departs in the books. Fans online held it against HBO that it missed that symbolic Sept. 1. It is a detail, but it shows how closely this audience is watching.

The Harry Potter series: Seven books, 10 years, one promise

The concept is easy to explain and hard to execute. Each season is to tell one book, in full and faithful to the original. For the first book, showrunner Francesca Gardiner and director Mark Mylod are taking eight episodes; the first film ran a little over two and a half hours. Gardiner was one of the writers on the HBO series “Succession,” and Mylod directed episodes of it; both stand for the prestige television on which HBO has built its reputation. David Heyman, the producer of all eight films, is also back on board.

The most striking departure from the films concerns the music. Instead of John Williams’ famous theme, Hans Zimmer is composing the score with his company Bleeding Fingers Music. For many fans, that is sacrilege; for HBO, it is a deliberate choice: The series is meant to sound like something of its own. Whether that will work cannot be judged after two teasers.

The real challenge is time. HBO ordered a second season, “Chamber of Secrets,” on May 6, 2026, before a single episode had aired. Filming was announced for fall 2026, with Jon Brown as an additional showrunner. There will not be a new season every year. Bloys told The Times of London in March that the series was too big and too vast for that. In September, he indicated to Deadline that the gap between seasons would be less than two years. Extrapolating from that, the final season would air well into the 2030s. The children who now play 11-year-old apprentice wizards would be adults by then. In September, the British tabloids also reported rewritten scripts and a delayed start of filming for the second season; HBO has not confirmed this.

HBO has also already had to make changes to the cast. For the second season, Kit Harington, known as Jon Snow from “Game of Thrones,” takes over the role of the vain teacher Gilderoy Lockhart. He replaces Nicholas Hoult, who dropped out because of scheduling conflicts. And according to Bloys, the most important character in the entire saga had not even been cast as of March 2026: Lord Voldemort.

The new faces and the price of fame

More than 30,000 children turned up for the open casting call, according to the BBC. Dominic McLaughlin was chosen as Harry, Arabella Stanton as Hermione and Alastair Stout as Ron. The adult ensemble is star-studded: John Lithgow plays Dumbledore, Janet McTeer plays Professor McGonagall, Nick Frost the gamekeeper Hagrid and Paapa Essiedu the Potions master Severus Snape. They are joined by, among others, Warwick Davis, who already played Professor Flitwick in the films, as well as Paul Whitehouse as the caretaker Filch and Johnny Flynn as Lucius Malfoy. Lithgow, born in 1945, would be around 90 at the end of a 10-year run; that, too, is one of the bets HBO is making.

Daniel Radcliffe, the Harry of the films, has written his successor a letter. He declined a guest appearance in the series as early as 2024. In doing so, he leaves the stage to the new generation.

How harsh a climate this generation is stepping into became clear early on. Paapa Essiedu, who as a Black actor is taking on the role shaped by Alan Rickman, says he received racist hate messages and death threats. He told The Sunday Times that no one should have to go through something like that simply for doing their job. According to Variety, HBO responded with social media training and a security team for the cast. There is an awkward twist: Essiedu is among the signatories of an open letter in support of transgender rights. He is now working on a series co-produced by J.K. Rowling.

The children’s situation is even more delicate. Anyone who signs at 11 commits for up to 10 years to a role that is watched around the world. Writing in Prospect magazine, the British critic Caspar Salmon questioned whether children can gauge the consequences of such fame. He pointed to Jake Lloyd, the young Anakin Skywalker of “Star Wars,” and Maisie Williams of “Game of Thrones.” What protective measures HBO has taken specifically for the three leads has not been publicly described.

The Rowling question

No figure shapes the debate over the series as strongly as the woman who created Harry Potter. J.K. Rowling has publicly taken gender-critical positions since at least December 2019: In her view, biological sex remains decisive for women’s rights and protected spaces. LGBTQ organizations and part of the fan base regard her statements as transphobic; Rowling rejects that accusation. There have been calls for a boycott ever since the series was announced. Rowling responded to them with mockery as early as 2023.

The conflict has escalated since then. In April 2025, Britain’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the term “woman” in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex; at the same time, the court stressed that transgender people remain protected from discrimination. Rowling had given financial support to the group For Women Scotland, reportedly tens of thousands of pounds. She celebrated the ruling publicly. In late May 2025, she launched the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, which uses her private fortune to finance legal proceedings on women’s sex-based rights in Britain and Ireland.

HBO is nonetheless standing by her. Rowling’s views are personal and political, and she is entitled to them, Bloys said in May 2025. What matters, he said, is what is on the screen. Nothing would be secretly slipped into Harry Potter, the HBO chief said on the podcast “The Town.” Asked by Deadline in September whether her views had made casting or production more difficult, he replied that they had not in the slightest. Formally, her role is that of an executive producer. By her own account, she is not one of the writers but works closely with them and has read the first two scripts. What financial stake she has in the series is not publicly known.

The old film family is divided as well. Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint publicly sided with transgender people in 2020. In 2025, Emma Watson said on a podcast that she regretted that a conversation with Rowling had never materialized. The author responded on X with a barb, writing that no actor who had once played one of her characters owed her eternal agreement. At the same time, she accused Watson of ignorance. For viewers, an old question arises anew: whether a work can be separated from its creator. Some see every subscription as support for Rowling; others regard precisely this equation as the real overreach, because it subjects art to an ideological litmus test.

Who owns Hogwarts now

The series is launching inside a company that no longer exists in its old form. In December 2025, Netflix had agreed with Warner Bros. Discovery to buy the film studio and HBO Max for $27.75 per share. Then Paramount Skydance offered $31 per share for the entire company, about $111 billion. The board deemed that offer superior, and Netflix pulled out in February 2026. In July, 12 U.S. states filed suit against the merger and forced a halt to its closing. The September settlement came with conditions: $1.5 billion for film production in the U.S., at least 30 theatrical films a year and a body meant to safeguard the editorial independence of CNN and CBS.

The takeover has been complete since Oct. 6, 2026. The new company is called Skydance and is led by David Ellison. The deal was financed in part with $47 billion in new equity, some of which came from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and from the Abu Dhabi investor L’IMAD. Combined, the company counts more than 200 million streaming subscriptions. According to Ellison, HBO Max and Paramount+ are to be bundled first and later merged into a single service; there is no timetable. So anyone who signs up for HBO Max today to watch Harry Potter does not know under which name they will be watching the second season.

For the new owner, Harry Potter is the most valuable brand on the shelf. HBO Max had 131.6 million subscriptions at the end of 2025 and well over 140 million in the first quarter of 2026. For the second quarter, the company no longer reported a total. The series is supposed to make that curve steeper again. And it is only the front door to an entire ecosystem.

The studios in Leavesden, where the series is being made, are adding 10 soundstages and expanding their capacity by more than half, with completion due in 2027. The numbers explain why a company is willing to film, a second time, a story it has already told successfully once. This is not about a remake. It is about securing a brand for the next 20 years, with children who have never seen the films in a movie theater.

What the magic costs in Switzerland

HBO Max has been available in Switzerland since Jan. 13, 2026, launching at the same time as in Germany and Austria. The Basic plan with ads costs 9.90 Swiss francs a month, the Standard plan 16.90 and the Premium plan, with 4K and four streams, 23.90 francs. Sports cost an extra 7 francs. In Germany, the same tiers cost 5.99, 11.99 and 16.99 euros, and the sports add-on 3 euros. Compared in nominal terms, that is, without converting currencies, Swiss customers thus pay 41% to 65% more, and more than double for sports. In Germany, prices will rise by one euro each starting Jan. 1, 2027. Whether Switzerland will follow is unclear.

Ralf Beyeler of the comparison service Moneyland explains the pattern matter-of-factly: “Many streaming services try to skim off the high purchasing power of Swiss customers.” HBO Max is not an outlier here but the rule. Anyone who subscribes to all six major services at once (Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, Apple TV, Sky Show and HBO Max) pays 68.49 francs a month for the entry-level plans, 95.49 francs for the standard plans and 122.99 francs for the premium plans. Over a year, that comes to between 822 and 1,476 francs.

The HBO Max launch also has a Swiss peculiarity. Until now, HBO series in Switzerland have mainly streamed on Sky Show. Some of that content disappeared from the service as of Jan. 1, 2026. According to Sky Switzerland chief Eric Grignon, however, new seasons of major HBO titles such as “House of the Dragon” or “The Last of Us” will continue to come to Sky; HBO accounts for less than 20% of the series catalog, he said. The new Potter series, by contrast, streams exclusively on HBO Max. Anyone who wants both, the full HBO lineup and Hogwarts, pays a combined 34.80 francs a month for Sky Show Standard and HBO Max Standard.

There is a cheaper strategy that streaming providers do not like to see: If the season is released weekly as expected, two months of subscription are enough. That would come to 19.80 francs on the Basic plan or 47.80 francs on the Premium tier. All eight films are also available on HBO Max in Switzerland.

Switzerland, incidentally, has always been Potter country. In 2004, “Prisoner of Azkaban” was the year’s most-attended film, with 608,204 admissions. Today, the saga fills concert halls: At the KKL Luzern, the culture and convention center in Lucerne, the 21st Century Orchestra under Ludwig Wicki performs the film scores live during screenings, and “Deathly Hallows: Part 2” is on the program in February 2027.

Can it work?

The first reactions to the teaser were divided. Nostalgia was pitted against criticism of the washed-out colors, the absence of John Williams’ music and the close resemblance to the films. Some commentators asked why anyone would remake a story that is already available, in the form of the films, on the same platform. The second teaser looked more colorful and adventurous, as if HBO had been listening. As of mid-October, there were no reviews.

The case for the series rests on what the films could not do. Spreading one book over eight episodes leaves room for supporting characters, for the world beyond the main settings and for the quiet moments that were sacrificed to dramatic pacing on the big screen. With “Game of Thrones” and “The Last of Us,” HBO has proved that it can take major source material seriously. And a new generation of children will experience Hogwarts not as a remake but as a first encounter.

The case against the series is the sum of its risks: a run extending well into the 2030s, children who grow up faster than the scripts, a new owner with its own plans for its streaming services and an author whose name has become a matter of conscience for many viewers. Then there is the yardstick. For millions of people, the films are a childhood memory. No remake has ever won against memories.

Arena: Must-see or superfluous?

Commentary: Hogwarts deserves a chance, the prices do not

There are many reasons to reject this series. Some of them are good ones. But the reflex to shun a work because of its creator’s stance is a private decision, not a moral duty. Those who think Rowling’s positions are wrong are free to say so and free to switch off. Those who want to watch the story of a boy who learns that courage and friendship are stronger than origins should not have to justify themselves. A platform like this one, which attacks positions and not people, should be the first to defend that distinction.

More critical than the cultural question is the business question. HBO has the right to retell Harry Potter. But the bill being presented to Swiss audiences is hard to justify. When the same service costs up to 65% more in Zurich than in Munich in nominal terms, that is not magic but price differentiation by purchasing power. The answer is as old as the subscription itself: sign up, watch, cancel.

And a request to HBO belongs here, too. Starting at Christmas, three children will carry a billion-dollar brand on their shoulders, on an internet that has already greeted their adult co-stars with death threats. A company that is moving billions for this series should disclose how it protects them. That would be the magic that counts most.

All figures as of Oct. 18, 2026. The release schedule, the budget and J.K. Rowling’s financial stake have not been officially confirmed. Streaming prices according to Moneyland (December 2025) and the Swiss computer magazine PCtipp (January 2026), subject to change; HBO Max prices in Switzerland and Germany compared in nominal terms, without exchange-rate conversion. Statements originally made in English are paraphrased. Quotes originally given in another language were translated by the editors. Sources are cited in their original language.

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Sources

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• The Hollywood Reporter India: First trailer and premiere
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