From Harry Potter to the Wizarding WorldThe Transfiguration of a Franchise

Explores the creative and commercial developments of the Harry Potter franchise during the 2010s

• Examines a variety of media and cultural forms (authorship, a website, a theme park, a studio tour, a film trilogy and a play), bringing together academic exploration from interdisciplinary fields with an overarching theoretical and industrial framework
• Each chapter explores a different franchising development and uses a combination of textual analysis and industry analysis to evaluate the role of these developments in relation to evolving franchising strategies
• The book focuses on one franchise case study (Harry Potter) but places it within broader industrial context, making the book relevant for understanding developments in the wider media, screen, and cultural industries

The Harry Potter franchise is not confined to just the page or the screen, but has been and continues to be reimagined and reconfigured through a number of extratextual products, texts, and experiences which surround and rework the Harry Potter texts.

This book centres around the 2010s, or the ‘post-Potter era’, a period of unprecedented growth and reinvention for the franchise. Many of the franchising developments produced during this time operated according to distinct strategies: to consolidate the legacy of the Harry Potter series, or to extend the fictional universe into new settings, media and cultural forms.

This book explores six such developments - J.K. Rowling’s authorship, the website Pottermore, the ‘Wizarding World of Harry Potter’ theme parks, the Warner Bros. Studio Tour in Watford, the Fantastic Beasts films, and the stageplay Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – to shine a spotlight on a franchise in flux.