Culture
Actor Who Died In The Fourth Film Promises New Show Will Be Better
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
Gary Oldman, 66, best known to Wizarding World fans as Sirius Black and to everyone else as a man who has played literally every nationality on film, stepped forward this week to offer his enthusiastic endorsement of HBO's forthcoming Harry Potter television series, stating publicly that it will be "more satisfying" for fans than the Warner Bros. film franchise he was personally part of.
Oldman appeared in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix, and, in flashback form, Deathly Hallows Part 2. His character, Sirius Black, was killed in Order of the Phoenix by falling through a mysterious stone archway called the Veil, which is exactly as unsatisfying an ending as it sounds and perhaps explains why he is so eager to endorse a do-over.
The comments were made in a recent interview in which Oldman praised the HBO adaptation's decision to include substantially more material from J.K. Rowling's original novels. The films, he acknowledged, were forced to trim enormous sections of the books for runtime reasons, leaving fans of the source material consistently disappointed across eight movies and roughly twenty years of grieving.
This is, on its face, a fair point. The books average around 500 pages each. The films averaged around two and a half hours each. Something had to go, and what went, apparently, was everything fans actually cared about, including several entire subplots, multiple characters who existed for hundreds of pages and then simply did not exist, and the general sense that any of it was connected to anything.
The HBO series, which has no premiere date and no cast announced as of press time, is expected to dedicate an entire season to each book, giving the writers room to restore the missing material and, presumably, the missing dignity of characters like Peeves the Poltergeist, who appeared in all seven books and zero of the eight films because someone at Warner Bros. simply decided he did not need to exist.
Hogwarts alumni have historically been unreliable forecasters of project quality. Emma Watson spent a decade hinting she might return to the franchise before eventually not returning. Daniel Radcliffe has described the films with the specific enthusiasm of a man recounting a mild dental procedure. Rupert Grint has been refreshingly honest about the whole experience in the way that people are honest about things they are glad are finished.
Oldman, however, remains bullish. Whether this is genuine conviction or the natural optimism of someone who died before the franchise got truly exhausting is difficult to say.
"I think the fans will be very happy," Oldman reportedly said, from a position of having exited the story in 2007.
Fans online responded with the full spectrum of emotion the internet provides, ranging from people who are genuinely excited about the new series to people who are furious that J.K. Rowling will financially benefit from it to people who are furious at the people who are furious to people who simply want Peeves.
HBO declined to comment. J.K. Rowling did not decline to comment, because she never does.
Production is expected to begin sometime this year. Oldman is not expected to be in it.
The story we are making fun of: https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/gary-oldman-hbo-harry-potter-series-more-satisfying-than-movies-1236859390/