Twenty-three seconds into HBO’s new “Harry Potter” trailer there is a shot the films never bothered with. A letter sits on a scrubbed wooden table, crumbs around it, and the green ink on the front reads “Mr R. Weasley, The Burrow, Ottery St Catchpole, Devon.” Then the camera finds the boy it belongs to. Ron Weasley (Alastair Stout) is grinning at a breakfast table in his own house, and for the first time in twenty-five years of Harry Potter screen adaptations, we are watching somebody other than Harry get the letter.
The two-minute-thirty-seven trailer went up on the official Harry Potter channel on 2 September, and the series premieres this Christmas on HBO and HBO Max. Warning, beyond this point we describe the trailer shot by shot, including which scenes from the first book appear, which characters are revealed and which one is deliberately kept off screen. That last one is the real story here, and it took going through all forty-six shots frame by frame to be sure of it.
For the first time in twenty-five years of Harry Potter screen adaptations, we are watching somebody other than Harry get the letter.”
Start with the Burrow, because it is the clearest signal the show is not just re-shooting the movie. In the book, and in the 2001 film, Ron arrives already sorted into Harry’s story. He is a boy on a train with a corned beef sandwich. Here he has a house, a kitchen, a mother, and two older red-haired brothers messing about across the table from him under a round stained-glass window, almost certainly Fred and George, played by real-life twins Tristan and Gabriel Harland. That is roughly ninety seconds of screen time the source material simply does not contain, and it tells you what eight seasons of television are actually for.
The spine of the trailer is the Sorting, and it is given room the films never gave it. Minerva McGonagall (Janet McTeer) opens the whole thing over a train whistle: “Before the start-of-term banquet, first-years will partake in the sorting ceremony.” Then the names come, spaced out across a minute. “Granger, Hermione” at fourteen seconds. “Weasley, Ronald” at twenty-one. “Potter, Harry” at twenty-nine. In between, Hermione (Arabella Stanton) turns to Harry with the single best line in the trailer, and it is not from the book: “Did you love the summer reading?” He blinks at her. “There was summer reading?”
Lavender Brown (Sienna Moosah) supplies the anxiety underneath it. “The house we’re put in basically decides our entire future,” she says at thirty-three seconds. “So, no pressure.” Six seconds later Harry (Dominic McLaughlin) is whispering “Not Slytherin, not Slytherin” under his breath, and at forty-one seconds the hat says “Gryffindor!” and the hall goes up. It is the sequence everyone knows, played almost beat for beat, and the show is clearly banking on you wanting to see it again rather than wanting it changed.
Now the absence. Severus Snape gets the trailer’s sharpest dialogue, at eighty-four seconds: “Let’s hope you show some talent on the Quidditch pitch, Potter.” Beat. “You’ve certainly not exhibited any in here.” It is a genuinely nasty read, more openly contemptuous than Alan Rickman’s drawl, and it is the first proper taste of Paapa Essiedu in the part. And you never see him. We went through every one of the trailer’s forty-six shots and then re-cut the dark stretch between sixty and ninety-five seconds at higher exposure to be certain. Snape’s line plays entirely over Quidditch footage. Whatever Essiedu looks like in the robes, HBO is holding it back.
That is a deliberate choice, and an interesting one, because Essiedu’s casting drew the loudest reaction of any announcement this show has made. Holding his face for the next trailer is either confidence or caution, and there is no way to tell which from here. What we can say is that the decision was made, because the audio was cut in and the picture was not.
The rest of the footage is a tour of a first year. Herbology arrives at sixty-six seconds, a long glasshouse full of children in mustard-yellow smocks with Pomona Sprout (Sirine Saba) working at the bench, and two of them holding up a leafy root between them. At seventy-nine seconds a single feather sits on a desk beside an inkwell, which is Wingardium Leviosa and needs no caption. Dumbledore (John Lithgow) gets a warm, oddly modern piece of advice at sixty seconds: “Mr Potter, I expect you to work hard, find what sparks your interest, and make solid friendships.” Hagrid (Nick Frost) turns up in his hut around ninety-nine seconds. Hedwig gets a beat of her own just before. McGonagall appears again at a hundred and eighteen seconds holding a small wrapped box, which if you know the book is a Christmas morning and a cloak.
The last thirty seconds go where the first book actually goes, which is somewhere much darker than the marketing usually admits. “We can’t protect them,” someone says at a hundred and fifteen seconds. “We can only prepare them.” A second voice: “For what?” Then, at a hundred and twenty-one: “Anything could be lurking behind any door in this place.” The images underneath are the endgame. Giant chess pieces in silhouette. Ron alone on a blue-lit chequered floor, looking up at something enormous. A page of a book headed “Alchemical Theory,” which is the Philosopher’s Stone being researched in a library rather than explained in dialogue. It closes on Hermione: “Oh, come on, don’t you two read?”
So is the criticism fair? Den of Geek called the trailer “inescapably familiar” and asked why remake something audiences already have on a shelf. We cut the March teaser alongside this one to test that, and the honest answer is: partly. The March teaser was the Muggle world, Privet Drive, Vernon Dursley telling Harry “there is nothing special about you,” Hagrid describing his parents, and it ended on the Hogwarts Express. It already showed the greenhouse, the moving staircases, Quidditch in the snow with “POTTER 7” on the back of the robe, and Hagrid making a snow angel. Some of what feels new here is footage we have already seen from a different angle.
But the two trailers are doing genuinely different jobs, and the second one is more interesting than the first. March sold you a boy nobody wanted. September sells you a school, and specifically a school with other children in it who have their own houses and families and opinions about summer reading. The Burrow is in it. Lavender Brown has a personality. Fred and George exist before they are needed. That is the argument for eight seasons, and it is the only argument that matters, because nobody needs a longer version of the film.
One more thing worth noting, because it appears on screen for a couple of seconds, fifty-six seconds in, over an aerial shot of students standing in a ring in a Hogwarts courtyard: “Based on the beloved books by J.K. Rowling.” HBO has not hidden that credit, and given everything attached to it, the decision to hold it on screen that long is its own kind of statement.
What Do You Think? Is holding Paapa Essiedu’s Snape back a sign HBO is protecting its most controversial casting, or just saving the best reveal for the next trailer? Does putting Ron in his own house before he ever meets Harry justify stretching one book across a whole season? And after two trailers, are you seeing a new adaptation or a very expensive re-run?
Catch up properly: every Harry Potter film, book and era in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Harry Potter timeline.
See you on the next binge!
