Expecto Cash-onum!
At the start of 2024, Warner Bros. went on its own little victory lap over the success of Hogwarts Legacy. WB Interactive Entertainment president David Hassad announced in early January the game had sold over 22 million copies in 2023, more than 2 million of those in the festive period, boasting that this made it “the best-selling game of the year in the entire industry worldwide.”
This is not surprising. Regardless of any controversies around its creator J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the wider Wizarding World is among the biggest media franchises on the planet, and has made more money than things like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Call of Duty. Hogwarts Legacy wasn’t the first Potter game, but previously the titles had been movie tie-ins, Lego versions of same, puzzle games and mobile titles: this was the first standalone big-budget game set in that universe, and a big audience had been waiting a long time for such a treatment.
Success on this kind of scale makes a sequel of some sort inevitable, and WB Discovery’s CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels has now come right out and said it: as well as giving a vague timeframe.
“Obviously, a successor to ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ is one of the biggest priorities in a couple of years down the road,” said Wiedenfels, during the Bank of America’s 2024 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference (thanks, Variety). “So there is certainly a significant growth contribution from that [games] business in our strategic outlook here.”
That implication of a 2026 release date may well just be some casual language, though it would put three years between the original and the sequel, roughly the kind of schedule that WB’s highly successful Arkham series ran on. That may sound a little tight at the AAA end but one notable asset of this series is in the name: each entry has to be set in and around Hogwarts somehow, and WB Avalanche has already built the place.
Speaking of Arkham, Weidenfels went on to describe Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League as a “miss” for WB. One interesting link into all the above is that, following Suicide Squad’s poor reception, a Bloomberg report into the project’s development noted that a chunk of Rocksteady staff have now been assigned to work on an upcoming but as-yet unannounced Howarts Legacy director’s cut. Which makes a lot more sense if WB Avalanche is already full steam ahead on the next one.
It has taken WB considerable time to get to this point: during the heyday of the movies, it was content for EA to just make tie-ins under license. But now it looks like there’s going to be a steady stream of Potter titles with the latest, Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions, a re-imagining of the wizarding sport starring various of the original characters. There will never be an eighth book, of course: but if there was, it should maybe be called Harry Potter and the Extremely Happy Shareholders.
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