The Beginning of the End of J.K. Rowling

Warner CEO David Zaslav’s November 3 earnings call with investors has been widely heralded as great news for author J.K. Rowling, with headlines trumpeting “Warner’s Exec Doubles Down on Rowling,” and similar tripe.

This is completely erroneous.

In reality, that earnings call announced the beginning of the end of the most extensive and unprecedented creative control over an entertainment franchise any creator has ever enjoyed.

The call is significant for what it didn’t say. Zaslav didn’t say he wanted another Fantastic Beasts; he didn’t say he wanted more Wizarding World. He didn’t say he loved the fact that for more than a decade, the author has been expending her energy on “Robert Galbraith’s” Cormoran Strike series and a series of inflammatory Tweets and social media posts that started with transphobia and in recent months has taken a sharp turn into open hate-mongering.

He said he was open to developing more Harry Potter content with the author.

He didn’t exactly order the author to sit her ass down, stick to her knitting, stay in her lane, and write more bestsellers that can be turned into hit movies—although that would seem to be precisely the winning formula the author has completely forgotten.

Zaslav has been criticized in social media for deep cuts in Warner’s media content, including a number of animated projects with avid fan followings. He’s been called “out of touch” and worse.

One thing he’s not is sentimental, least of all for J.K. Rowling. Nor is he in awe of her mystique.

Zaslav embodies the Hollywood dictum, “What have you done for me lately?” and the axiom, “You’re only as good as you last success (or failure).”

The success of the Harry Potter movie franchise was built on one very simple foundation: a series of bestselling, world-conquering books.

For the past decade or more, Rowling has been doing everything in her power to ignore this simple truth and cut corners at every turn, penning threadbare screenplays for the Fantastic Beasts films and writing only a story outline for The Cursed Child, the latter of which in book form was likened to reading “bad fanfic.”

While Cormoran Strike would be a major success for most authors, as a BBC detective series with almost no penetration in North America and a following of mostly middle-aged female readers in the U.K., it doesn’t even register as an entertainment franchise in comparison with the juggernaut Harry Potter. And yet she’s announced at least several more Strike novels, with no plans for more Harry Potter content.

It would be as if George Lucas had persisted with Howard the Duck spinoffs instead of returning to Star Wars. Of if Arthur Conan Doyle had never resurrected Sherlock Holmes in favor of whatever the hell else he wrote.

Not only has Rowling cut every corner with Potter short of outright neglect and wasted her time on a modestly successful series of routine potboilers (routine except for their prolixity). She’s also contravened the non-bullying ethos of her major work, leaving tens of millions of her former fans feeling deeply betrayed. Antipathy for her amounts to box office poison unprecedented for any franchise in fandom history.

The quiet death of the Fantastic Beasts series has put the once unstoppable author in quite a spot; David Zaslev has Robert Galbraith by the balls.

If for whatever reason, if more Harry Potter content fails to materialize at Warner, either by the author’s hand or a chosen set of continuators, it’s unlikely Rowling will get a better deal—including the most pervasive and unprecedented creative control ever given to an author or content creator in the history of entertainment—anywhere else.

And if she were to self-finance another Wizarding World production, the likelihood that she will end up losing her castle in Scotland and die completely penniless increases exponentially.

History is littered with the rich and powerful who’ve lost fortunes on hubris and folly. And Rowling shows every sign of going down the same path.

“Cancel culture” may not have gotten J.K. Rowling, yet. But she has surely laid the groundwork for her own demise. With Zaslav’s shot over the bow, she’s one bad move from finally destroying everything she created.

It is the beginning of the end of J.K. Rowling.