Today is, canonically speaking, boy wizard Harry Potter’s birthday. He is 38, it seems. (Not coincidentally, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is 53 today.) As of the writing of this article Rowling is yet to publicly celebrate the birthdate of her most famous creation in her traditional fashion of tweeting a new Harry…
The second film in the five-part Fantastic Beasts series is currently in production, and the early glimpses confirm that the wardrobe will remain as exquisitely lush and detailed as in the first. Oh, and Jude Law has joined the cast as a young Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, who will one day grow a very long…
Late last month, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald director David Yates defended casting Johnny Depp as the eponymous villain in the Harry Potter spin-off sequel despite the allegations that he physically abused ex-wife Amber Heard. Yates suggested that Depp is totally different from people like Harvey…
Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…
One of the main themes of the Harry Potter series is that the power of love and friendship will always win out over unhinged cruelty and evil. J.K. Rowling highlights this theme by consistently reminding readers that Harry would be straight-up dead if he hadn’t lucked into making two very important friends during his…
A valuable copy of a Harry Potter prequel, handwritten on a postcard by author J.K. Rowling, was stolen during a recent home burglary, according to Reuters, with Rowling herself asking fans for help in its safe return. The 800-word story is reportedly set three years before the boy wizard’s birth and focuses on Sirius…
J.K. Rowling continues to share her opinions about the series of novels that she finished publishing about 10 years ago, this time explaining on Twitter that she’s sorry for killing off Harry Potter’s antagonist-turned-heroic martyr Severus Snape. Her admission is part of a tradition on the anniversary of the pivotal…
We’re starting to think author, political commentator, and general all-purpose windbag Piers Morgan might get a certain thrill out of getting knocked around on Twitter. Hot off getting into a high-profile spat with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling—over comments Morgan made last week on Real Time With…
The ongoing Twitter feud between bestselling author J.K. Rowling and TV personality Piers Morgan is the stuff of crack for those of us who like Rowling for her wit, dislike Morgan for his rampant pro-Trump drivel, and enjoy the asshole getting owned repeatedly. We wrote about the origins of the feud and a London…
If you’re one of the nearly 10 million people who follow J.K. Rowling on Twitter, you may have noticed her absolutely burning Piers Morgan lately. It started on Saturday, when Rowling retweeted a clip from Real Time With Bill Maher where Jim Jefferies, an Australian stand-up comic and writer, tells Morgan to fuck off.
A lot of things are dividing the American people right now: fear, politics, a giant, hypothetical, and very stupid wall. So it’s in the hope that we can all find a little common ground and shared joy that we spread the news that professional bloviator—and certified Celebrity Apprentice—Piers Morgan has been spending…
Hufflepuff has long been the most mockable Harry Potter house, largely because the idea that founder Helga Hufflepuff “took the rest”—a.k.a. the students without discernible personality types—doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. But now it seems that Gryffindor is the house lowering its standards. In fact, it’s stooped…
Tilda Swinton is not a fan of Harry Potter, and it’s not just because she probably knows how wrong the books are about conjuring spells. (Just ask Swinton about apparating. We bet she knows how to do it.) No, Swinton dislikes the world of Potter because it makes kids dream of leaving their parents behind and going off…
Richard Linklater’s autobiographical 2014 film Boyhood drew critical praise for following a young actor (Ellar Coltrane) for a number of years as he progressed from childhood to adolescence and onto young adulthood. But the Warner Bros. Harry Potter film franchise, based on the novels by J.K. Rowling, basically did…
If you saw the Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them over the weekend and were a tad underwhelmed with the scope of J.K. Rowling’s expanded universe, don’t worry too much about the future films. It might seem hard to imagine that Rowling and director David Yates will be able to wring another…
With Run The Series, The A.V. Club examines film franchises, studying how they change and evolve with each new installment.
In the lead up to the release of Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, we’ve learned that Albus Dumbledore will be a part of the series, and that his one-time friend—the baddie, Gellert Grindelwald—is played by Johnny Depp. So clearly the five-part franchise isn’t exactly isolated from the Potter books. At a press…
Deadline reports that HBO has acquired the U.S. and Canadian rights to a BBC One crime series based on the works of “Robert Galbraith”—a.k.a. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. The series stars War & Peace and The Musketeers lead Tom Burke as Rowling’s war-wounded P.I. character, Cormoran Strike. The first Strike book, …
With Reading List, The A.V. Club asks one of our favorite pop-culture creators to describe a list of reading materials that are tied together by a singular theme.
Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them is set about seven decades before the events of the Harry Potter series, so there aren’t many well-known characters who can make appearances in the five-part prequel film series. The events of this film probably even predate the birth of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. However, there…
