Harry Potter

In Kyle’s wiki, Harry Potter appears as a worked example of franchise/IP dependence in Hollywood, via the essay The Hits Business. David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, named it explicitly in a November 2022 message to investors: “We’re going to focus on franchises. We haven’t had a Superman movie in 13 years. We haven’t done a Harry Potter in 15 years.” The quote is cited as an executive “saying the quiet part out loud” — Harry Potter standing in for the dormant, high-value IP that public-company growth pressure pushes studios to revive.

In that framing, the franchise is less a story than an asset: the public-company profit motive (“there must be growth… there must be Shared Universes”) is what drives the decision to reactivate it.

Context: Harry Potter is the J.K. Rowling book series and Warner Bros. film franchise; its Wizarding World is one of the highest-grossing media franchises ever, and a Max television adaptation was subsequently greenlit — the kind of IP revival Zaslav was signaling.

Where this appears

• David Zaslav — named Harry Potter in his investor quote as dormant IP to be revived under a franchise-first strategy (The Hits Business).