4 Harry Potter Textbooks Primed to Be Movies Next

Although Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them does not have a series of books to draw from, it didn’t just suddenly appear onto the scene as a movie. It began its life as a textbook in the Potter universe … and here are four more warranting film adaptations.

Quidditch Through the Ages

Like Fantastic Beasts, Quidditch Through the Ages was published in the real world in 2001, and it’s just begging to be made into a sports mockumentary in the same vein as 7 Days in Hell. The somber interviews, the old-school montages, the goofy jargon … Lee Jordan and Luna Lovegood’s Quidditch commentary already made the games tinge with humor, now the series just needs to go the rest of the way.

Hogwarts: A History

Everyone makes fun of Hermione for actually reading Hogwarts: A History but you know what? Hogwarts has a fucking fascinating history. As we learn in Deathly Hallows, two of the ghosts — the Bloody Baron and the Grey Lady — have a tragic backstory of Shakespearean proportions.

The Room of Requirement and its endless capacity for chamber pots is fun, and who isn’t curious about the Forbidden Forest or the merfolk and the giant squid who lives in the lake? Hell, as we learn in Chamber of Secrets, even the Hogwarts bathrooms have stories. Hogwarts has history, and it should be explored in a television miniseries or a Ken Burns style pseudo-documentary.

Travels with Trolls by Gilderoy Lockhart

Gilderoy Lockhart turned out to be a fraud. That being said, his books came from real events. He stole the stories of others who had travelled with trolls or voyaged with vampires and erased the real author’s memories in order to claim credit. The troll and vampire aspects are intriguing enough to be their own movie, but the real story would be a film about young Lockhart on a series of adventures, until the final M. Night Shyamalan-style plot twist.

Because most of the audience would already know the twist, it could play out more along the lines of Thank You For Smoking that Lockhart gleefully narrating his journey. Or, one could look to Shattered Glass, a story about a journalist who made up most of his articles.

Home Life and Social Habbits of British Muggles

This Muggle Studies textbook doesn’t sound that interesting on the surface, but picture a National Geographic style movie in which humans are presented as a strange curiosity. To add to the entertainment, the Wizarding world always gets subtle details about the Muggle world wrong.

The Harry Potter world seems to expand more and more with each passing year, but it doesn’t have to be a drag. The Weasley twins madcap way of thinking paid off beyond any studio exec’s dreams.