The Wonderful, Weird, and Waning World of Harry Potter

It's hard to believe but it has been twenty years since the release of Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and penultimate book in a "children's fantasy" book series that is undoubtedly the publishing phenomenon of the past half-century. The literary and publishing world - and the world in general - has never seen anything like Harry Potter, and likely won't ever see something like it again.

As a reader, as an English teacher, and as a parent whose children were born in 2002 and 2005, I was completely immersed in and fascinated by the world of Harry Potter from the moment I picked up the first book, roughly a year before the first movie came out. I was so taken with Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone that I read the book out loud to all my high school classes, every day, a couple of pages at a time. And I was stunned with how captivating it was for even junior-level high school boys who were not readers in any sense of the word. 

This book is something special, I thought, something altogether different.

For an avid reader and pop culture fan who came of age at the dawning of the Star Wars franchise phenomenon, the Harry Potter books represented all the magic that storytelling can be. But, that said, it's equally fascinating how the books, the films, the stories, the franchise, ... dare I say, "the magic," has faded into history far more quickly than I would have thought. And that's the subject of a fascinating piece of cultural commentary from British writer Louise Perry who suggests, "Millennials, It's Time to Leave Hogwarts." 

It’s been almost 20 years since the final Harry Potter book was released. The wizarding world is still generating interest — book sales remain strong, and the 2023 video game Hogwarts Legacy, topped 40 million sales. HBO is working on a TV adaptation of the books, set to be released next year.

But the relevance of the franchise is waning. “We’ve seen our audience age up,” conceded a Warner Bros. executive of the recent spinoff films. When the first of these, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” premiered in 2016, just 18 percent of cinema goers were actual children.