Is There Going To Be A ‘Harry Potter’ Netflix Series in 2020?

Okay, just, everyone calm down for a hot second, take a deep breath, and repeat after me: Netflix is not making a Harry Potter TV show. If you’ve heard that Netflix is making a Harry Potter show, then you’ve really just heard about a piece of fanart that has snowballed out of control, rolling over an April Fools’ Day news post (curse you, April Fools’!) to create a big ol’ snow monster of a thing that isn’t true no matter how much fans want it to be true. So no, there is no Netflix Harry Potter series.

What happened, as far as I can tell, is that back in November 2017, a fan created a poster for a Harry Potter Netflix series and posted it to a fan group. The fake poster includes a close-up of Harry’s face, shrouded in a scarf, with only his lightning bolt scar and trademark glasses showing. The poster has the Netflix logo and “Christmas 2020” written on it; hence all the Harry Potter Netflix 2020 excitement. The fake poster was then shared on a bunch of Facebook groups (yes, this is fake news), thus exposing it to more and more people while never actually making its way to actual news sources.

The image continued to be shared on Twitter over the past few months, popping up a few times from November to today.

This is a fake. This is not a real poster. To quote Decider’s resident graphic design wizard Dillen, “I don’t buy that font for a second, and the kerning is stale. It’s okay Photoshop at best, the effects on him. The saturation is weird on it, and it’s not high res. I don’t think those are real glasses at all. The lightning bolt and glasses tip me off that this isn’t real, along with the not-that-compelling design.”

The problem is, and where I think all of this confusion is coming from, is that fans are now conflating that fake poster with a fake article from April Fools’ Day 2017, published over on Hypable. The article’s headline is a nerdy clickbait dream (‘Stranger Things’ kids cast in Netflix ‘Harry Potter’ series, produced by Joss Whedon), so “too good to be true” that obviously, it is too good to be true. Of course there are now posts on Facebook touting the poster as fake but the article as real.

Even though there is nothing to be found about the Harry Potter Netflix series on Snopes), neither of these are real. They are both fake.

I’ve been reporting pop culture news for almost a decade, specifically pop culture news from the realm of sci-fi, fantasy, and superheroes where fan posters are everywhere. Rule #1 when it comes to fact-checking: look at the date. First of all, the article is from April 1. Any news story published on April 1 is automatically questionable. Second, this article is from 9 months ago. Even if it was published on another date, the fact that it’s from nine months ago and no one else has said a peep about something as massive as a Harry Potter Netflix show starring the kids from Stranger Things and produced by Joss Whedon is another major clue that it is not true. If it was true, you would know about it immediately.

Could there eventually be a Netflix series set at Hogwarts or another part of the Wizarding World? Maybe. Probably, at some point! Franchises don’t die! But right now, no, there is no Harry Potter Netflix show. However, all 8 movies are currently streaming on HBO Now, so if you want to pretend that they’re all part of an HBO original series, go on with your wizard self!