Harry Potter began its journey back in 1997, when a struggling single mother put a story about a wizard boy onto the page and quietly changed the world. Nobody quite saw it coming: not the publishers who rejected the manuscript, not the industry that underestimated children’s literature, and certainly not J.K. Rowling herself.
The release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 2001 grossed $317 million domestically and over $974 million worldwide, launching a film saga that would go on to earn more than $7.7 billion at the global box office. But the numbers, as impressive as they are, only tell part of the story. What Rowling built was not just a franchise: It was a world that millions of people genuinely did not want to leave.
Part of what makes Harry Potter so resilient, is that its popularity was never built on affection alone. The franchise operates as a fully integrated entertainment machine: Warner Bros. controls the films, the merchandise, the theme parks, and streaming rights, creating a system where every new infrastructure only works because the story underneath it earns the attention. Rowling built a narrative that speaks to something close to universal: the feeling of being overlooked, of waiting to be chosen, of discovering that you belong somewhere you never expected. That is not a message with a target audience, it’s a message that finds one wherever it goes.
A Franchise under pressure
No cultural phenomenon survives without scars, and Harry Potter is no exception. The controversies surrounding J.K Rowling hit differently than most, because they did not come from outside the fanbase, they came from within it. Fans who had grown up with these books, who had stood in line at midnight releases, written fan fiction and named their pets after characters, suddenly found themselves having to decide what the story meant to them now. Not only the fan base stood up against the controversy related to Rowling, but also the movie’s cast. The shadow it cast over the brand was real and uncomfortable, but it also raised a question that the franchise’s history would eventually answer: can a story outgrow its author? Can a world belong to its readers as much as to the person who created it?
It started in 2019, when Rowling began publicly voicing her views on gender identity, defending a researcher who had been fired for transphobic comments and posting statements on Twitter that defined womanhood in ways that excluded transgender people. The response was immediate and painful. Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who had spent a decade playing Harry Potter, released a public statement in support of the transgender community. Emma Watson (Hermione Granger) followed. Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) followed. The people who had given faces to Rowling’s characters were now, one by one, stepping away from their creator. It was the kind of fracture that does not heal quietly.
For many fans, especially those who had grown up queer and found something like safety in the pages of these books, the betrayal was personal. Harry Potter had always been a story about the outsider finding a place to belong. That was supposed to be the point. The idea that its author held views that made some of its most devoted readers feel unwelcome was not just a political controversy. It was a contradiction at the heart of everything the story claimed to stand for. And yet, even as that wound stayed open, the world Rowling built kept pulling people back. That tension, between the story and its creator, is one the franchise has never fully resolved. It has simply learned to live with it.
The pandemic revival
As it turned out, the audience had already made up its mind, and the pandemic was the moment that proved it. When the world shut down in 2020 and people were left alone with their thoughts and their bookshelves, many of them reached for something familiar. Harry Potter’s publisher, Bloomsbury, reported its most profitable first half in over a decade, with profits rising 60% and revenue up 17%. Wizarding World, the franchise’s global platform, saw its revenue skyrocket nearly 150%, driven by a surge in e-book and audiobook sales. People were not discovering Harry Potter for the first time, they were going back home.
But the pandemic did not just bring back old fans. It created new ones. The hashtag #DracoTok reached a fever pitch in 2020, accumulating over 28 billion views on TikTok, introducing Hogwarts to teenagers who had never read a single page of the books. On Wattpad, fan fiction set in the wizarding world flourished, with a new generation writing themselves into the story and making it their own. The first Harry Potter Movie was viewed over 40 million times on Max in 2024 alone, reaching nearly 20% of the platform’s entire subscriber base. A film from 2001, still winning. That is not nostalgia. That is staying power.
In the first half of 2025, it was still among the most-watched titles on Netflix, with 20.3 million hours of viewing. A film that, by that time, was 24 years old , competing with everything the modern streaming era has to offer, and still reaching the biggest audience. That staying power does not happen by accident. Harry Potter has always understood something that most franchises miss: a story only lasts as long as it keeps finding new places to live. Books became films, films became theme parks, theme parks became video games, video games became TikTok edits and Wattpad fan fiction. Every platform opened a new door into the same world, making sure there was always a way in, regardless of where a new fan happened to be standing.
25 years of magic
Still, 2026 feels different, and not just because of a number on a calendar. Warner Bros. Discovery has thrown its full weight behind a year-long campaign marking the 25th anniversary of the first film, with worldwide events, limited-edition merchandise, and fan experiences that are less about selling a product and more about reminding people why they fell in love with this world in the first place. All eight films are heading back to movie theaters, this time with exclusive behind-the-scenes material included. It is not just a re-release, it is an invitation to sit in a dark room with strangers and feel something together again, which, when you think about it, is what Harry Potter has always been about.
What makes the campaign work is that it does not treat the anniversary as a farewell. There is no sense of “one last look” in any of it. Every activation, every limited-edition product, every theatrical screening is designed to point forward as much as it points back. The 25th anniversary is not a closing ceremony , it is a warm-up act for everything that is still coming, and Warner Bros knows it, and the audience knows it too.
The HBO factor
And then there is the HBO series, which might be the biggest piece of all. Few announcements in recent entertainment history have generated the kind of sustained, breathless conversation that the upcoming Harry Potter television adaptation has managed to produce before a single frame has been filmed. Casting rumors land like breaking news, production updates get dissected for hours, the revival works precisely because it is not asking fans to forget the past, it is giving them something new to look forward to, a retelling expansive enough to finally do justice to everything the books contained that the films had to leave behind. Analysts project that on launch day alone, the first season could potentially cause the user count for Max to double. That is not hype, that is a franchise that never lost its grip.
A giant that never slept
Harry Potter was never really gone. It was in the books people kept on their shelves long after finishing them. In the theme parks filled with adults who brought their children to see what they had once loved. In the streaming queues of people who just needed something that felt like comfort on a hard night. The controversies tested it, the years quieted it, but nothing erased it. What 2026 has done is not bring Harry Potter back, it has simply turned the lights back on, the giant was always there. It just needed a reason to stand up.
And that reason, it turns out, was never going to be a single event. It was always going to be the accumulation of everything: the anniversary, the HBO series, the new generation that found Hogwarts on TikTok, the older one that never really left. Franchises do not survive for thirty years by accident. They survive because they mean something to people in a way that is hard to explain and even harder to let go of. Harry Potter is not a comeback story; It is a story that never ends. It was just waiting for the world to catch up.
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The article below was edited by Eloá Costa.
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