There’s no doubt that Harry Potter is one of the most popular franchises out there, as proved by its ever-growing continuation with media like Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. When the first books and movies came out, everyone suddenly wished they had also received a Hogwarts letter, and you’ll often still hear people talking about what Hogwarts house they would be in. However, everything released since in an effort to continue on with the universe of the wizarding world seems to be greeted with mixed feelings and not doing nearly as well as the first series.
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This, of course, does extend to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Written and performed as a play, it makes it hard for many fans to even see it if no one is performing it near them. Of course, the script was also released in book form to help reach wider audiences, but it’s not the same, as you miss a lot of the tone and inflection an actual performance would carry. While making the play into a movie would make it more accessible, it risks a similar failure to the one the Fantastic Beasts franchise met for several reasons.
Cursed Child Doesn’t Feel Like Harry Potter
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While set in the same world, and still including many settings and characters well recognized in the Harry Potter franchise, there is definitely a disconnect between the original series and the play. When first entering the wizarding world, the sense of wonder is what strikes you as you learn more about magic and the wizarding world overall. Then, throughout the seven books, you still get to see magic and mystery even as dark forces begin to take control and come back. At its heart, the story is a magical adventure. Cursed Child, however, is a drama. You lose some of the magic and wonder when the main plot could be on any general TV show, as family and teenage drama take center stage.
As fans began to watch and read the play, some were left unsatisfied, often calling it a bad fan-fiction in the Harry Potter world. After excitement and adventure all driven around one central antagonist in the first series, when it seems the whole play is focused on drama and the reveal of the antagonist influencing events only happens towards the end, they don’t feel like the same universe at all. And all that is without bringing in some of the plot holes fans found, or the repetitive nature of the play that makes it feel like it goes on for a little too long without anything seeming even remotely closer to being solved. If the play had been about chasing the antagonist through the story instead of being fueled by many branching dramatic points, it might have felt more like the wizarding stories everyone had already come to know and love.
The Play Contradicts The Original Stories
Many fans call the play “not canon compliant,” meaning they don’t believe this existed in the same universe at all and pretend Harry’s story ended after the first series. A lot of this is due to some plot devices that either forgot what the series had set up for them, or chose to ignore these details in order to tell the story they wanted to tell. It’s all led to plot that not many people are fans of.
Perhaps the biggest issue in the play is the time turners. Though the movie skips over this detail, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, while fighting in the Ministry of Magic, the entire stock of time turners is rendered unusable. There are also many rules in place surrounding them, including how hard it is to get a hold of one, as well as the fact that you can only go back about five hours without doing any serious damage to the timeline. Cursed Child features a set of new, illegal time turners that seemed to be made just for the plot, and they aren’t restricted by five hours. Instead, it lets them travel as far back in time as they want, but only for five minutes. Of course, those five minutes can still cause irreparable damage, just as it seems to do in the play.
Other, smaller details can be issues too. Another one being the epilogue where we see Harry telling his youngest son, Albus, that he doesn’t have to be scared of the possibility of being sorted into Slytherin, and tells him that if he really is that scared, he can always ask the sorting hat to not put him there, as Harry did. Not only does this not happen and Albus gets sorted into Slytherin anyway, but his sorting seems to be one of the main reasons there even is any dramatic plot, as Harry doesn’t seem to like this outcome. For a series as big as this one, it really can be the little things that make the fans upset.
Characters Were Nearly Unrecognizable
From beloved characters returning in ways that didn’t seem like themselves to new characters with connections that seemed to come out of nowhere, the play didn’t do well in the character area. At first, it seems the characters might be alright — Hermione is Minister of Magic, Ginny works as the sports editor for the Daily Prophet — but they don’t feel quite like themselves whenever they’re on stage together. It only gets worse as the timeline starts shifting, with Hermione becoming a worse teacher to the students than Snape was, Ron being cast off to the side and all but forgotten, and even Cedric Diggory lives past the Triwizard Tournament to become a Death Eater. Nothing that they did made them feel like the same characters as those we came to know. Harry especially seemed to be the worst for fans, as he doesn’t feel like the hero of the previous story anymore, but only as a bad father that also feels out of character.
One of the play’s new characters also caused a stir. It doesn’t help that a play doesn’t often get much exposition especially for minor characters, so you lose a lot of the personal connection and understanding with them. This is exactly the case of Delphi, the friend turned foe when she revealed herself to be influencing the plot in her favor, convincing Albus to go back in time to fix things but merely trying to create the future she wanted. That is, she wants her father back: none other than Voldemort himself. Apparently, sometime before his demise in the seventh book, he and Bellatrix Lestrange not only had an affair, but an entire child, for she died in the Battle of Hogwarts as well. Without any set up from the books to make this even seem possible, it’s the driving point that turned many fans away from the series, and would mean a movie would meet the same cold reception that they had given the play.
